Using the MXO2 Mini

One of my clients started the move towards HD and added 1080p LCD monitors and Matrox MXO2 Minis to their suites to output and view HD. I personally own the Blackmagic Intensity card but had considered purchasing the MXO2 Mini. One problem - it wasn't out yet at the time and somehow I had convinced myself I needed to get an HDMI out solution ASAP. I kind of wish I waited for the MXO2 Mini.

If you're not familiar with the Mini, check out this link. Essentially it's an external box that's available with both "desktop" and "laptop" options. The box has HDMI in/out, component, a convertor for S-Video and RCA audio outputs for audio monitoring. One of the big selling points of the MXO2 series is the monitor calibration tool that you'll find in the System Preferences tab:

Here you can tweak the brightness, contrast, hue and chroma of your outputted image. There is also a "Blue only" checkbox that helps you set up your monitor when used in conjunction with color bars. When you install the drivers for the Mini you'll now see several dozen output options in Final Cut Pro. It's a bit daunting to sift through, but every possible outputting format seems to be there. This is one real strength of the box - format support. You're extremely limited in your output options with the Intensity, but with the MXO2s you have just about every flavor of HD, SD and frame rates to choose from.

There are some bugs with the box. Audio seems to be shaky. Frequently audio will distort and sometimes cutout altogether in playback in Final Cut. Usually after a moment or two the audio would return, but on a couple of occasions I had to restart Final Cut to get the audio to come back. Also, lip sync seems hard to achieve when viewing A/V out of the HDMI. There are of course offset tweaks in FCP, but I can never seem to get it exactly right. That, and it seems to be a fluid situation with sync - sometimes it's on, other times it's off just a bit. Hopefully an eventual fix will come out for this.

Another quirk seems to be in the way it handles 720p video, especially if you have certain LCD monitors like the Vizio. At first, anytime I tried to output any flavor of 720p video, the resulting output would yield green and distorted video. Doing a Google search revealed others with the same problem and the fix seems to be to change the "Set main channel format to:" option to 1080. Doing this with the appropriate 720p output setting in FCP yielded noticeably sharper video. The TV is still receiving a 1080p image, but the Mini must be actively uprezzing the video to 1080p. Whatever voodoo magic that's taking place seems to be for the better.

Annoying Bug in FCP

John Chappell talks about an annoying bug in Final Cut that still has yet to be fixed involving the browser window. There are a number of bugs like these that seem to be overlooked by Apple's Pro Apps team. Maybe it'll be fixed in the magical 64-bit ground-up rewrite they'll announce at NAB next week, right???

Lack of Posts

To be honest, I don't have a whole lot to report on the world of AVCHD. The last few months have brought more freelance editing gigs away from my own stuff. I did get a chance to edit with some Red and Canon 5D footage, but other than a few small things here and there I haven't really edited any material that originated in AVCHD since last year.

I've decided to expand the focus of this blog a bit to include all things in the world of video. I'm going to be going to NAB next month so I hope to have some posts about things that I saw there. And I can always muster up some rants about Final Cut, but I'm still on FCS 2.0 right now so my rants might have been solved in the latest version. I'm refusing to upgrade for the time being and seeing this has only confirmed that decision. Compressor is a finicky beast and right now it's tamed on my system. I always seem to have something cooking in there and the last thing I want to do is install a new version that slows it down. Hopefully a future update will solve this. Or, better yet, we'll hear some news at NAB. But who knows if Apple will even whisper anything about Final Cut.

FW800 vs. eSATA

It's an established fact that SATA is faster than FW800. I know a lot of editors who own external drives like G-RAIDs but never use the e-SATA connection, sticking to FW800 instead. I recently purchased a SATA card for my Mac Pro and connected my G-RAID up via eSATA. Here are the speed differences:

G-RAID via FW800

Via eSATA:

A $40 or so internal card and a different cable and you get a pretty decent speed increase. So if you own a G-RAID or another external drive that includes an e-SATA port, you should definitely consider getting the most out the drive as you can.

Another music video

I've been busy, mostly editing, but I have still been doing some work with the HMC150. I've shot another music video with it. It was for The Nobility and they wanted a similar look to their first video which I posted a few months past. It's another one-take and it was shot with a Blackbird Stabilizer. I barely knew how to use the thing so it's not as steady as I would have liked, but it could the job done. A lot of people talk about their arm hurting after using these, but for me it was my right hand. The song is less than 3 minutes but multiple takes add up and my hand was absolutely killing me by the end of the night.

I normally use my own customized setting but this time around I used the Spark setting. The end result was a general crushing of the blacks to minimize the appearance of the black curtain behind the actors. I was going for the look that they were performing in front of a black void and for the most part it appears that way. The actors did a great job not busting too many takes even though they were in semi-absurd scenes.

Click on the video for an HD version:

Mr. Danby/Mr. Blackman from The Nobility on Vimeo.

Backing Up

I've mentioned it in this blog, but it's worth discussing again - we MUST back up. Since we're shooting in a tapeless format we don't automatically have a "back-up" of our footage. That was one major advantage of shooting on tape. Once you digitized your footage you now technically had two copies: your newly created Quicktime file and your tape. Maybe your plan is to buy new cards for every project, but this can get expensive. Spending $45 or so for a 16GB SDHC card can get pretty expensive when you're comparing it to a sub-$100 SATA drive that can hold a lot of backups. So eventually you'll be reusing those cards, deleting the camera original and existing, at least temporarily of course, in a world where there's only one copy of your footage.

I found out earlier that we can simply back up our cards to a drive and as long as we retain the file structure, and keep the Final Cut project file, we can resurrect that project via File and Transfer. Having to only back up the original AVCHD file structure means we can back up significantly more footage to drives compared to the Final Cut created Prores 422 files.

My back up procedure is finally in place. After I've backed up my cards to my internal SATA drive, I'll make a second back up copy. I'm buying fairly cheap Western Digital internal SATA drives and I'm plugging them in to an external SATA dock. The SATA dock plugs in to your computer either by an ESATA connection or USB2 (here's the one I own and it's worked great). The drive will appear on your desktop like any other external drive. Once the drive's full I'll eject the drive, put it in an anti-static bag and store it. It's important to note that most hard drive experts say you have to spin a drive at least once a year to avoid data loss, so if you have a To-Do list or use iCal, schedule yourself a reminder about 6 months from now to take out that particular drive and fire it up.

Now this gives me a couple of back ups of my material. It's also important to back up any other files you might have used like music, photos, graphics, and titles. If you want to be really paranoid about protecting your data, then you're probably going to have to go to the next step - offsite backups. What good is a back up if it's in your office and something happens to your office? You could potentially lose not only what's on your computer but also on the back up drive.

There are a number of options. You could simply double up your internal SATA orders, duplicate each drive and keep one in your office and one in off-site storage. I imagine you could also invest in a number of DVD-DLs, or buy a blu-ray burner and discs, and back up this way and keep that offsite somewhere. Or you could look at a service like Carbonite which with a fully paid subscription you can back up an unlimited amount of data. The back up process will take a long time, especially if you start with a pretty big legacy of material, but having your data backed up offsite can really add to some peace of mind.

Archiving

When you're in the world of tapeless post production, there are no tapes to have for archiving purposes. So you must back up your data on some sort of storage media. As I mentioned in a previous post, if you use Final Cut Pro to transcode to ProRes, you'll discover that your file sizes might not always correspond to the quality your camera recorded it at (i.e. the lowest quality 1440x1080 clips in AVCHD world become significantly larger than the highest quality 720p files). So if you back you your ProRes files you'll need a significant amount of storage space. But what about just backing up your AVCHD files?

This process is actually easy. What I'm doing is creating a folder on my storage RAID that is called AVCHD Card Back Ups. Within this folder I create a folder for each project. If I only used one card for that project, I'll simply copy the PRIVATE folder from the card to this project's folder. If there were multiple cards used, I'll create a set of folders with the simple name Card 1, 2, 3, etc. Copy each card's PRIVATE folder to their respective folders and that's it.

Be sure to keep a copy of your Final Cut project and one day, when the client asks for changes, you fire up that project, open up Log and Transfer, point it to appropriate PRIVATE folder(s) and re-transcode back to ProRes. The file naming scheme should remain the same. Obviously it's important to keep your original ProRes files named exactly how Final Cut named them, so when you re-transcode you can reconnect to the right files.

The end result is you back-up the significantly smaller AVCHD files and blow away the much larger ProRes ones. You'll be able to back up a lot more projects to the same disk as a result.

PS - I won't even get in to the idea that if you archive your files to a standard hard drive you'll need to be sure to power it up and let the platters spin periodically to prevent data loss. Do a google search and you'll see a lot of discussion about this fact.

Not HMC150 Related...

But I recently completed editing some spots for Martina McBride's upcoming "Shine All Night Tour". They've set up a channel over at You Tube to show off the spots and here's one of them (for some reason this doesn't really appear to be in "You Tube HD" even though I know they had the source files. Oh well, still looks okay):

Prores 422 ignores HMC150 record modes

You probably already know that the HMC150 records its 1080p and 720p PH clips at a maximum of 21Mbps. So technically these clips have the same data rate, or close to it. But if you use Final Cut to transcode these clips you'll discover they no longer remain at the same data rate. Final Cut's Prores essentially ignores the data rate of the camera original and only pays attention to the resolution. So that 720p clip's data rate at 24p becomes roughly 7.1 MB/sec and that 1080p 24p clip swells to 13.8 MB/sec.

Even worse, at least to me, is what Prores does to the camera's lowest quality setting, HE. These files are recorded to SD card at a tiny 6Mbps, but because the resolution of the clip is 1440x1080 and 29.97, the transcoded Prores clip swells to over 15MB/sec! That's right, a clip that is more than a third smaller than the highest quality 720p clip becomes twice as big as it after transcode.

The HE mode is perfect for long recording times, especially when the subject is a human who's giving a very long speech. You can squeeze many more hours of footage on your SD card and not have to worry about stopping to change out cards. But all of that space savings is thrown out the window once you transcode. I'll leave you with an example:

Clip - recorded using HE mode

Length is 1 hour and 13 minutes

AVCHD file size - 2.97 GB

Prores 422 file size - 65.92 GB!

The Bible

Barry Green over at DVXUser has finally released his book on the HMC150. It's pricey, but it sounds like it's worth it. The book seems to explore exactly how to get the best images out of this camera and how to deal with the various conditions we face when we shoot video. Maybe the book will explain exactly what is Detail Coring. My copy is on the way and I'll weigh in a review in time. People that own his other books all rave about it, so I think it's worth checking out.

If you'd like to order, hit this link.

Canon 7D

Canon recently announced the Canon EOS 7D which can shoot 1080p 24p HD video, as well as 720p (including 60p for overcranking). The format of choice for Canon is AVCHD. The camera is intriguing because I'm already considering going the route of getting a 35mm adapter for my HMC150, but I do not currently own any professional lenses. We're also wanting to get a "real" DSLR camera, so why not combine the desire for shooting HD video with the ability for nice DoF videography and a nice DSLR?

There are a few videos that have popped up featuring footage from this DSLR shot by some of the best in the business. Here are a few of the links:

• FreshDV @ the Provideo Coalition has a link to the short Perya. Beautiful!
• Philip Bloom's "Random Dublin"
• Another Bloom short called "Dublin's People: Canon 7d 24p"

What's clear by these samples are that the 7d seems to remain relatively stationary, shot almost as if they were taking stills. I love these kinds of shots where the action exists within the shot (as opposed to whip pans and intentional "shakycam"). Because this camera uses CMOS sensors, there's the risk of "jello" or rolling shutter, so it appears the filmmakers were careful and played to the camera's strengths. I have yet to see evidence that there is rolling shutters with the 7D but I'm sure it's possible.

Gentle Giant

I recently helped direct and shoot a music video for a great band called The Nobility. The video was shot using my Panasonic HMC150 at 720p 24p. In post we added some looks in Magic Bullet Looks and further dirtied up the video a bit using Nattress Film Effects. All of this to hopefully capture the look of an old filmstrip PSA. I'm pleased the results and the camera performed well.

Here is the video for your viewing pleasure:

"Gentle Giant" video from The Nobility on Vimeo.

Scary Thought...

Here's a scary thought... you've been shooting footage for 30-40 minutes on your SDHC card and suddenly you get a CHECK CARD warning. You check the card, it records again just fine and you assume it was a temporary blip. But what if, when you're ingesting that footage in to your system, you discover the clip is unreadable or completely missing? The HMC150 does not have a redundant system for recording media - you have one card slot and thus one card that can record media at any given point. Of course many cameras are this way, and if you're still recording tape there's always a risk of the tape breaking, but with tapeless media it just seems all the more scary.

There's a long and eye-opening thread about a handful of people who are seeing these kinds of problems with one particular brand of cards - Transcend. There seem to be twice that many that have replied to say they own the same brand and size of card and have had zero problems. It's worth checking out.

HMC150 Mac support, finally

Panasonic has finally acknowledged that people who own the HMC150 also might own a Mac. So now you can finally update the camera's firmware. Here's the link for instructions on how to do that.

ProRes Conversion Times

I've noted before that I'm getting better than 50% realtime performance with my Mac Pro Quad Core 3.0 when converting to ProRes. But this is using a SD card reader plugged in to a USB 2 port. With the Canon HG-20, we were using the internal HDD and because of this we had to plug the camera directly in to the computer with the provided USB cable. The resulting transcode times nearly doubled. We shot about 3 hours of material with this camera and it took a little under 3 hours to transcode. So basically you trade the convenience of having an internal storage option with the Canon with much slower transcoding times.

Note: The Canon HG-20 does accept SD cards, so you can bypass recording to the internal drive you if you so choose.

Another Wedding Down...

We just shot a wedding over the weekend and the results from the HMC150 were impressive. Very little noise and great looking images overall. The only real noise begins to appears at the reception that evening which was indoors. I had to bump up the gain which naturally introduces noise.

I needed to get a second camera, one that was easy for my wife to operate, so we purchased the Canon Vixia HG-20. I wanted to go with a small Panasonic thinking there might be some similarities between my HMC150 and it. However you couldn't buy a Panasonic camcorder with a mic input and a headphone jack for under $1000. With Canon you could, so I settled on the HG-20. It shoots at the full data rate the AVCHD spec offers and it has the combo of an internal drive and can shoot on SD cards. I've looked a lot of the footage so far from the camera and I'm impressed. If you need a second camera, Canon offers a number of options for under $1000 and they include headphone jacks. I mean, seriously, why does Panasonic leave this out?

Neo Scene

I've been trying to give Cineform's Neo Scene a shot this morning. I had originally downloaded the trial a few months ago but got incredibly busy. I fired up the app anyway and attempted to do a test for the speed and it crawled to render one frame. I was then reminded that Cineform only provides a 7 (7 days, really??) trial of the software. So, okay, the performance had to be the results of an expired trial, right? I deleted the files and downloaded a new version and I still see the same speed results.

I want to assume there's some little file somewhere that tells Neo Scene to not function properly because I'm trying to get use out of it beyond it's trial. I'm hoping this is not a clue as to the speed of the app. I guess I screwed up and should have fully tested it when I initially downloaded it, but it's hard for me to want to take a risk on buying the app if I can't gauge the speed.

A commenter on here said he's found that NeoHD is a lot faster than Final Cut, but what about Neo Scene? It's quite a bit cheaper, but I was hoping that was from the source file limitations and not because of speed. If anybody has an opinion on what I might be experiencing (i.e. - the software is crippled OR that's just how slow it is) please let me know.

The next Final Cut Pro

A number of people have been posting/tweeting rumors about when the next version of Apple's Final Cut Studio will come out, but there's been little talk about what will actually be in it. Will it be a major upgrade or just enough of a change to warrant a whole new version number?

Scott Simmons wrote up some of the things he'd like to see addressed, and a couple of them are my major hopes. Simply FCP should NOT open the previous project, at least not in a multi-user, multi-edit suite environment like a post house. If Apple truly thinks its product is making major penetration in to post houses across this country, and is NOT simply being used by one editor/producer on one long project, then they need to get serious about the way its software handles projects and users settings.

A Project and User Prompt

Yeah, like Avid, but who cares? There should be two modes you could put FCP in to and this can be asked when you install the product for the first time. You could edit in the traditional FCP way which would be to always load the previously opened project and the previously used user settings. However, we should have the option of a "post house" style with a window prompt asking us which project we want to open and which user settings. I have clients where one machine might have two editors working on it on the same day. And three different projects might be worked on. It would be nice to know from the start which project you're opening and who's settings are going to be loaded. And about the user settings - they should be consolidated under one global user setting name. Give us more things to tweak and all of those things that are listed under the User Preferences menu item? That's absolutely silly to call it that if one user can change something deep down inside that menu structure and it affects EVERY user who comes after him. Make those settings customizable to a particular user's name. So when I select my project and my name at the beginning, then I'll record EVERY keyframe when I ride the audio mixers. You might not want to do that, so you change that under your user setting name and you'll know from the start what FCP's behavior will be.

Capture/Render Scratch Settings

Another pet peeve of mine that FCP does is how it treats capture scratch settings (where you digitize and render to) as a global setting and not something that's a project-level setting. I think it should be the latter. Apple gives us editors a lot of rope to hang ourselves, especially in multi-user and/or multi-project environments. For example: have you ever worked on multiple projects in one day? Do each of those projects live on separate drives? So do you remember to change the capture scratch EVERY time you open a different project? Or when you take a seat for the first time in a few days at a busy edit suite, do you always remember to check the capture scratch settings before you proceed? If you do, you're awesome. I bet most of us forget every now and then and sometimes this can be a critical mistake. Like what if the producer wants to view a project you've been working on in another room. They load that partition, open the project and there's media and/or render files missing. D'oh!

Apple could cure us of some of these ills by simply making the capture scratch a setting for that project. So when you open that project, FCP will automatically make the appropriate partition set as the capture scratch. If for some reason that partition is not mounted on the desktop, you'll get a warning prompt to do so. Easy right? Maybe there's an obvious reason why Apple shouldn't do this, but it seems to make sense to me.

I can think of further things that would help with media management, like having the ability to import music/graphic files/photos from within FCP, and FCP knowing what to do with the files. For example: you load a music CD, import some tracks and FCP automatically saves it to a MUSIC folder on the appropriate scratch disk, imports the music to the drive as 48K AIFF AND imports those tracks in to your project.

We'll see what the next version holds, but I'm hoping it's something like the above.

NOISE!

So there have been a few posts on boards about potential noise issues with the HMC150. I honestly hadn't seen it myself, and I wrote off most of those reports as user error. Indeed many of those threads ended with a resolution that saw some combination of resetting the camera and using different scene files.

I also never had a way to monitor my footage outside of my computer until recently. So when I finally sat down to look at the footage I shot from a wedding this past weekend, I was shocked. There was noise, everywhere... in shadows, which wouldn't be all too surprising, but also in highlights and in perfectly lit scenes. I went back and checked some of my previous footage. I saw a little bit of noise, especially in the shadows, but the footage looked good otherwise. So something happened to my camera just before this wedding shoot.

Here's a sample still from this shoot: noisy mess

So the last couple of days whenever I had some downtime I've been tweaking and testing. I reset the camera, which I'm not 100% sure actually truly reset the camera as much as at least rest the scene files and menu (see this thread for more information) and then searched through the HMC150 board at DVX User and found Barry Green's scene file recommendations. The results were noticeably better and returned my level of satisfaction with this camera.

I noted that the camera looked the best shooting 720p 60, even though the "native" shooting rate of this camera is suppose to be 24p. I noticed just a tiny bit more noise in 24 vs. the 60p footage. Here's a 60p still post-camera reset and using new Scene File settings: much better. There is still some noise present here, but (at least to me) it's much softer and not the hideous distortion you see in the other still.

Ultimately I'm not really sure what happened to my camera. And if you find yourself shooting with yours and you have noise, everywhere, it's not suppose to be this way. I think we have to accept the fact that we're going to have some noise/compression, seeing as how this is not full blown uncompressed HD we're shooting here, but the footage should look relatively clean and beautiful. I'm going to continue to do more testing but I'm definitely going to be much more on guard with what is happening with my camera and you better believe I'll do some last minute testing prior to a big shoot to make sure the camera hasn't gone wonky again.

Note: The Scene File setting tweaks were as follows:

Detail: +2

VDetail: +2

Detail Coring: +1

Chroma +2 (I think this should probably be returned to 0 as the resulting image becomes just a little too saturated, but you might prefer this)

Master Ped: -20

Cine-Like V

More Conversion Time Data

I just shot a wedding with the HMC150 this past weekend. As far as I can tell the camera performed beautifully and as it had to put up with its operator's weaknesses. I'll obviously know a lot more as I get in to the editing process and see how the footage looks, especially in the extremely bright, overly lit-by-the-sun scenes and in the evening, when the light was starting to wain. I also used a Litepanels LP-Micro, so I'm looking forward to seeing how that looks.

One note, which actually surpassed my expectations, was how long it took to convert one of the AVCHD clips to ProRes. I assumed with my Mac Pro 3.0 DP it was about a 50% realtime process. I just processed my longest clip to date - 15 minutes - and it took 5:18 to convert this, thus greater than 50% realtime (or even faster). It's good to know that maybe there's a bump in speed the longer your clip is.