AVCCAM Road Show

Panasonic is doing a roadshow to show off their AVCCAM products, including the HMC150. Click here to see if it's coming to a town near you. If this presentation is anything like the one they showed at their NAB booth it's extremely impressive, including close up comparisons between HDV and AVCCAM. Hint - AVCCAM wins, hands down.

Final Cut Pro Instability

I know I cannot speak for anybody else when I write this, but FCP is extremely unstable once your project reaches a certain size. I've seen this on multiple machines for several different clients. I've seen my own extremely stable machine because a constant crashfest when the project's size tips the scale north of 50 MB or so.

For a while now I have been editing three documentaries for the PBR (Professional Bullriders) to be distributed on DVD by MTV. The shortest one is about 52 minutes long, the longest just shy of 60 minutes. I have gone from having one big giant project with everything in it (this was a mistake, clearly, and this was months ago when it was a LOT smaller than the three are today) to multiple projects for graphics, music, and cuts. The cuts project itself had grown to over 260 MB and it was simply comprised of the three sequences. So now I'm gone to a "final cut" sequence for each DVD. And yet even with this final step FCP still crashes just as frequently. One example bound to produce a crash is when I copy and paste something as simple as a Title 3D. The file size for each DVD final cut is about 55 MB. Again, north of 50 MB, the theoretical limit I've selected for when FCP becomes unwieldy.

During this long term edit I've had numerous smaller projects come and go, all without major problems. Sure, I occasionally had a crash or two, but nothing like what I'm experiencing with the DVDs. I know another production company that's editing a 1/2 hour series for Speed Channel and they have constant crashes with their larger projects. They have been trying to find creative ways of limiting their file sizes.

I would hope the next version of Final Cut brings about more stability with this app. There are more features I'd love to see as well, but I would just love the app to work the same it does with a small project verses a large. We want to pretend like Final Cut is perfectly acceptable for large projects, but sometimes you have to wonder if it really is. Or maybe it's just me...

Blackmagic Intensity Pro Arrives

My Blackmagic Intensity Pro card has arrived and the install was a breeze. I need to try to find a way to calibrate my LCD screen as best as possible. I know there's only so much I'm going to get out of this "cheap" HD monitoring solution, I'm not relying on this for broadcast critical work, but getting a decent calibration is going to be key to at least get a close representation of how my stuff looks.

I'll be sure to post my thoughts on the card soon.

HMC 150 used for a music video

Here's a nice looking music video that was shot on the HMC150 with a Letus Extreme. I'm definitely intrigued with the 35mm adapters.

HMC150 at NAB

I wish I took some pictures of this, but it's worth pointing out that Panasonic was really promoting the HMC150 and the AVCHD codec in general. They had dedicated almost twice the floor space to these cameras versus the P2s. They also constantly ran a reel showcasing the codec in action.

Blackmagic Intensity Pro

One thing that should generate more posting out of me is the fact that I just purchased the Blackmagic Intensity Pro card. Blackmagic Designs announced at NAB that they were dropping the price to $199. B&H Photo Video has the card for a little bit less than that. My main use of the card will be for HDMI monitor to a 24" LCD HD display.

The quality of the video should be good, but the LCD screen I will be using certainly is not reliable enough for broadcast mission critical color. But I don't find myself doing that type of work at home. For corporate, web and wedding videos it should provide you a decent reference of what your video looks like.

The card also features the ability to digitize video from HD camcorders with HDMI out, like the HMC150. So I'm going to be interested to see the quality of the image. From what I understand, when you digitize directly from the HDMI port of the HMC150 you're getting the full resolution of the camera BEFORE any AVCHD compression is added.

1080 vs. 720

Apparently 24mpbs is the maximum data rate available for the AVCHD codec. At this data rate you get incredible images. If you intercut with the HPX170, it's extremely difficult to tell which was shot with which. What's intriguing is that you get this maximum of 24 mbps in BOTH 720p and 1080p. So immediately you can see why most people say that the sweet spot for this camera is 720p. You get all of that extra data to pour in to 1280x720. So it's case closed, right? Apparently not.

Barry Green, one of the gurus over at DVXUser, and writer of several books on the DVX and HVX cams, has been doing a lot of digging around with the HMC150 to see just what you can do with it. He thankfully surmized that AVCHD was superior to HDV, and he also assumed through his testing that 720p on this camera was indeed the way to go to the maximum bang for the buck. However one thing kept nagging at him - color sampling:

"With the HMC150's AVCHD format, the frame gets resized and then the color gets cut to 1/4 the resolution (using 4:2:0 color sampling, like HDV or XDCAM-EX or XDCAM-HD). Which means that on a 720p frame, you get 1280x720 of brightness, and 640x360 of color. Whereas with 1080p mode, youll have a 1920x1080 frame, which may only have 1440x810 worth of detail, sure, but -- the chroma sampling will be at 1/4 the res of the full frame, meaning 960x540 of chroma. Well, that's a big difference, right? 640x360 = 230,400 chroma samples, vs. 960x540 = 518,400 chroma samples, or about 2.25x as much chroma...

The question then becomes: would you gain much by shooting in 1080 mode and downconverting to 720? You wouldn't gain much of anything in terms of overall image resolution, but you'd more than double your chroma res... So, does it make a difference? Um, well, yeah."

Check out the thread for more thoughts and observations from Barry. I would think that if you transcode to ProRes you should see identical file sizes in either 720 or 1080 since the camera uses the same data rate for both, but I'm going to test this for myself and see. So assuming nobody debunks this theory, I guess I'm going to start shooting in 1080p now instead of 720p. Might as well get every bit (literally) you can out of this camera!

ATT&T U-verse

A slight departure from the purpose of this blog, but I wanted to give a mini-review of AT&T's U-verse product. We recently switched from Comcast and we were glad to do it. Price wise you’re looking at more bang for the buck - more channels in general and more of them in HD compared to Comcast at similar price points. We're also getting the full 18 mbps internet that they offer, which is substantially faster than what Comcast currently offers in Nashville. So for roughly the same price we're going from having Comcast's basic digital TV package and 6 mpbs internet to having over 200 channels and 18 mpbs net. Not bad.

Internet

Now with Comcast you get their "burst" which skews speed tests and accelerates the first few minutes of your downloads, but with U-verse we're getting consistent download speeds that are more than 3 times faster than the sustained speeds from Comcast. Now all of this will change when Comcast unveils their faster internet products (some markets are already seeing these speeds), but since I live in Nashville - and we rarely EVER get something sooner than later here - I think U-verse will remain the fastest internet offering for now. There are rumors that AT&T will double their maximum download speed sometime in the near future, but that will probably require a price increase. So for now I’m very satisfied with the speeds I have.

Negatives

There are a few negatives, namely that the HD quality seems to vary. Some channels are great, others show artifacts and strobing effects. AT&T is apparently using a different compression scheme than what Comcast uses, and that they periodically improve the feeds as the technology improves. So hopefully the HD channels that are lagging now will improve in time. Also, if Verizon FIOS is what you’re after, you’re not going to get a fully suitable replacement here with AT&T. Unless you’re in a brand new neighborhood, you’re probably only going to have fiber to within 3,000 feet or so of your house. From there it’s over traditional phone lines. The install process took 4-5 hours, including them having to run a new twisted pair line from the pole to our house. AT&T will definitely spend the full day with you, if necessary, to get their product up and running. But in the end it seems like FIOS delivers substantially faster internet to their customers. But with the costs they incur to full wire a town, it’s no wonder that FIOS is offered in limited markets.

Finally what really puts U-verse over the top for me is some of the features they offer, namely the ability to watch DVR recorded material on any box in the house, being able to watch and/or record 2 streams of HD and 2 streams of SD at the same time, the ability to schedule programs on the net, and a better looking interface. The latter is pure aesthetics, but hey it counts. U-verse’s DVR interface is no TiVo, but it’s close.

I'm a bad blogger

My apologies for the lack of posts, but as an editor by trade my free time to experiment and play with this camera can come and go. Right now it's "go". But next week I'll have some time, thankfully, and I'm looking forward to it.

I'm interested in exploring my options of HD to SD. I know I can transcode to Proress 422 and then convert via Compressor to SD, but the results seem to produce flickery results. Lines at angles become jaggy. I'll have to post an example, but what motivates me to type this is right now I'm watching the SEC Tournament via AT&T Uverse. I have an SD TV still in the office and I wanted to see if I could watch the HD channel instead of the SD one. The answer is yes, I can. It's letterboxed and in general it looks great, but it produces similar results as Compressor. Lines are jagged, lots of shimmers. My assumption is the Uverse box is doing the conversion for me and it's hardware, so I'm wondering if this is the kind of results I should expect either using software or hardware down converting options? But I swear I've used an AJA Kona card before with perfect results, but sadly it's out of my price range right now.

Cineform

A commenter posted about Cineform coming out with a Mac version of their Neo Scene app that'll convert AVCHD to either a Cineform .MOV clip or ProRes 422. I haven't used it yet, but they have a free trial download so I'm going to give this a try this week and report back my findings. I'm very interested to see the file size differences between Cineform .mov clips and ProRes.

Here's the link if you want to try it out yourself: Neo Scene.

Slow Motion via Cinema Tools

So I have a link below that shows the results of using a 60p clip in FCP and dropping it in to a
29.97 timeline and applying a 50% slow mo. I'm now giving Cinema Tools a try and the results are pretty outstanding. It's an incredibly simple process. You simply open the clip you want to conform with Cinema Tools, select Conform and it'll ask you what data rate you want to change the clip to. I simply selected 29.97 and not even a second later it was done. I'm not sure if my Mac Pro Quad 3.0 had something to do with this speed, but if it does I can only imagine an octocore would be done before you even started.

Here are the results. I'm going to get a lot of use out of these ducks. They don't require model releases.

WARNING - When you select a clip and drop it in to Cinema Tools and you conform it - it rewrites that clip! So unless that's what you want to happen, make a copy of the files you intend to conform first, then proceed with Cinema Tools.

Drive Failures

I had some bad luck the past couple of days. I'm losing the drive in my Macbook Pro (I can mount it via Firewire target mode and copy data for 10 minutes before it starts clicking and freezing up the operating system) and my external back up drive will no longer mount (I can hear it spinning, but it is not recognized by Disk Utility). So between an edit session this week and copying data over in the evenings, I haven't had much of a chance to do much with my camera.

I'm afraid to be around my Mac Pro because I might kill the RAID I just installed on it. If you want to avoid losing a drive, stay away from me for a while!

More Coming Soon, Promise

I'm currently in an edit that's taking a lot of time away from experimenting with my HMC150. It's sad to think I'd rather be tinkering with this camera when I'm actually being paid to sit here and edit. So, sadly, I'll make some money for a few more days then I'll get back to this camera.

I have some questions still about the workflow with this camera. For now I'm sticking with ProRes 422 and it's several times larger file size. But I know I'm going to use this camera for clients who will ultimately only want to edit in SD in the short term. So how am I going to transfer, with TC, from AVCHD to DVCAM? For now the only solution seems to be to take my ProRes 422 clips and drop them in to Compressor, drop a DVCAM droplet on there and let it go to town.

But secretly I'm hoping there's another solution - like going directly from AVCHD to DVCAM. And the kicker is to keep and maintain TC. So Toast seems out for that. And digitizing via the HDMI in to a Blackmagic Intensity card seems out as well since TC is not passed along the HDMI cable. We'll see.

Mac Marginalization

Panasonic just released a firmware update for the HMC150. The firmware doesn't look critical, but it would be nice to be able to upgrade. Why can't I? Because in order to install the firmware you must have a Windows machine. Apparently this has been a standard practice for a while with Panasonic (with the HVX cameras you must have a Windows machine to update as well).

There's a thread over at DVXuser.come about this. I know there are answers like Boot Camp or virtualization, but that's asking Mac users to drop some coin on Windows for something as simple as firmware updates. But actually it's not just the updates - Panasonic offers other software, like a handy AVCHD to DVCPRO HD utility but it's only for Windows users as well. I have no idea what the percentage breakdown of Windows to Mac users is for Panasonic, but it has to look more Mac friendly than the general population. I can't think of a production company that I've either worked at, or know people who've worked at, that used a Panasonic camera and then edited on a Windows machine. It has always been Final Cut Pro or Avid (on the Mac). That's just my perspective. I know there are plenty of Windows users that edit this stuff. But the Mac numbers have to be high enough to justify writing firmware updates for us, right?

AV Sync Problems with Toast?

Over on the DVX Users board there is a poster who's having problems with his audio going out of sync with AVCHD clips he's transcoding with Toast 10. Since the clips I've been testing with Toast are not sound critical, I have not seen this problem. However Roxio has acknowledged there's a problem:

"As stated previously, this is a known issue as far as audio/video sync when using AVCHD files. We are currently researching a solution and ask that you periodically check for software updates. Thank you."

Here's the link to the thread. So it seems there's even more reason to just stay inside FCP and use Log and Transfer for the time being. If you have plenty of space, Pro Res 422 seems to be the way to go.

Slow Motion (60P to 29.97)

So the HMC150 can shoot 60p (frames per second). When you play this back at 100% it looks almost hyper-real. But if you drop it in to a standard HD 29.97 timeline and reduce the speed 50% you can get some incredible slow-mo. I have read that some people first properly conform their 60p footage to 29.97 or 24p (using Cinema Tools), but clearly the quality is good enough to get away with merely using FCP to do the slow motion for you.

In time I'll do a proper Cinema Tools test, but for now, here's a quick and dirty 50% slow mo using FCP: slow mo clip. I'm just getting down how to make these HD clips "web friendly", so the quality probably isn't quite as high as I'd like. But you should get the point.

Back from Charleston

I just returned from a quick trip to Charleston where I shot some more footage. I didn't log the camera around nearly as much as I thought I would, but honestly it's been a long time since I've had to shoot for hours each day. I found myself using my iPhone more thanks to a great app called Toy Camera that turns your photos in to Holga-like photos. You can check those photos out at my Flickr page.

I promise I'll have more updates soon and some sample footage, so please check back.

No Timecode?

So a quirk if you decide you want to use Toast to convert your AVCHD to DVCPRO HD - you lose your timecode. All clips that were converted using Toast started at the TC mark of 0:00. Thankfully clips brought in via FCP's Log and Transfer retain their original TC.

Transcoding Fun

I just installed Toast 10 and tested to see how long it takes to convert AVCHD to DVCPRO HD. The answer is about real time, or a little over 8 minutes for 8 minutes of footage. The file size was surprising - a :17 clip was 148.9 MB in ProRes, while the same clip in DVCPRO HD ballooned to over 236.2 mb.

At first glance in Quicktime Pro, there was substantial difference in color between the two as well:

In this screen grab you'll see the same frame with the QT window in the background being ProRes and the foreground being DVCPRO HD. There is noticeably less color in the DVCPRO HD. But when you export still frames from each of these clips, something surprising (to me) occurs:

The JPEG above shows the two clips merged together. On the left is DVCPRO HD, and on the right is ProRes. There's no noticeable difference to me other than the frame size diffence which shows the most in the lower center of the image where the trustle's support structure doesn't quite line up. In Final Cut Pro you also do not see a noticeable difference. The scopes do reflect a minor change when you toggle between them.

So I'm puzzled as to why these codecs look so different in QuickTime and yet look almost identical when used inside FCP. Ignoring the file size difference for a moment, DVCPRO HD seems like a possible winner. My assumption is it would be less tasking on my system than ProRes 422, however I cannot ignore the file size difference. For whatever reason DVCPRO HD comes out as the bigger file when using Toast 10 to export.

Perhaps I'm missing something here?

ProRes 422

So you have two options when you transcode AVCHD in Final Cut Pro's Log and Transfer - convert it to AIC (Apple Intermediate) or ProRes 422 (and not of the HQ variety). I chose ProRes. So how big do the files get after transcode? About 5 times as big! So it looks like for every 16 GB card you shoot, you're looking at close to 80 GB in ProRes QTs on your drives. Ouch. Thankfully my system - a Mac Pro Quad 3 - can chunk through these files in about 50% realtime (i.e. - 8 minutes of footage takes about 4 minutes to transcode. That beats digitizing!)

I want to experiment with transcoding to DVCPRO HD next. It looks like I'll have to use Toast to do this. Thankfully Toast 10 came from Amazon today!