Editing HV20 24 p footage

[brost]

What computers are you guys running? I know I will have to upgrade. (XP3000 64, 1.5GB ram, 300 gb hard drive, 512mb 7600 gs OC) Just wondering what I will need.

Thanks,
Sam

[jaelupo]

Originally Posted by brost

What computers are you guys running? I know I will have to upgrade. (XP3000 64, 1.5GB ram, 300 gb hard drive, 512mb 7600 gs OC) Just wondering what I will need.

Thanks,
Sam

My computer has the following specs:

AMD X2 3800+ Dual core
1.5 GB RAM
2X36GB Raptor 10,000 RPM drives RAID 0 for Speed
2X300GB Hard drives mirrored for RAID 1 for data protection
256MB GeForce 7800 Video card
32" High Def LCD Monitor
Windows XP Pro

All this and I still find the speed too slow when rendering video. Most computers can handle capturing just fine but, the rendering takes a lot of power. If you are going to do a lot of editing get a Dual core CPU this will help a lot.

Jae

[ib84]

Lots of you people think you need expensive commercial programs to work with HV20. However, it is not the case at all. actually, opensource software is often better quality, but more difficult to use.

I wanted to share some apps, that do the tricks necessary for 24p (inverse telecine) and for 60i footage (deinterlacing).

mencoder - a commandline tool with a lot of very advanced options.
belongs to mplayer project. you can find it on the download page. for USA, the link is:
http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/rel...l-20061022.zip
(this one is half a year old, but should do most things. for more recent versions you have to do little googling)
i found also lots of Graphical Frontends. the whole list on:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/projects.html (you must look for windows+mencoder...)
here?s a simple one with explicit batch support (likely others do that too):
http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=SMSG

Avisynth is another real "foundation", with lots of extremely usefull things you can do with it. it?s windows only and maybe is the best thing there is. however it is also only used in Text mode, by a script language. dvx is a rich graphical frontend for it. for inverse telecine look for "decomb"

virtualDub also allows for editing, and is extensible.

also check out http://www.vidomi.com it seems it has inverse telecine and batch support...

can?t test those apps though (except mencoder itself), since i?m not running windows...

[ib84]

here is how you would do the inverse telecine in mencoder. Inverse telecine is the process that extracts the 24p progressive format out of the 60i-stream.

mencoder Input.m2v -vf pp=ha:128:7/va,pullup,softskip -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg:vbitrate=130000:vhq -o Output.avi

like this you are transcoding in an AVI MJPEG-file with almost-lossless quality (comes out at about 70-90-mbits). for me it´s the best compromise being quite a compatible and well-editible format.

if you want to use lossless, you could use raw (huge files...) or lossless-Mjpeg:
mencoder Input.m2v -vf pp=ha:128:7/va,pullup,softskip -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ljpeg -o Output.avi


If you want to get Quicktime-compatible content, you >may< need to do another step with ffmpeg (for me, mencoder-MJPEG is not QT-compatible, but maybe it´s really a problem on my machine only). if you do this, it´s better to use ljpeg before.

ffmpeg -r 23.976 -s 1440x1080 -i Output_ljpeg_ivtc_24p.avi -vcodec mjpeg -aspect 16:9 -b 230000k final_quicktime-compatible-output_24p.avi

i don´t know yet how to do the scale right, with ffmpeg it comes as 4:3, just like HV20 shoot it (16/9 is done later in a lossy scaling process)

with mencoder you can also define, which part of the footage you want to edit, so in a way, it´s kind of a very basic "editing" too. you say at what time you want to start and how long.

Also, mencoder has a huge list of professional filters that can be combined in filter-chains. for more choice of for example high quality deinterlacers (yadif, lavcdeint, mocomp, and others), make sure to get a recent version.

of course, you can transcode in almost any conceivable format you want. (like VLC plays almost everything, mencoder transcodes to almost everything). This includes x264, one of the top-3 most advanced H.264 implementations there is. (Quicktime 7 compared to x264, is a real "joke"). Of course Xvid, and other 3 MPEG4-SP / -ASP variants, two of them (xvid and lavc) are >extremely configurable< and you can be sure to get the best possible, if you are an expert. you can get very reasonable results with the many possible Graphical frontends, see links above.

[jaelupo]

Originally Posted by brost

What computers are you guys running? I know I will have to upgrade. (XP3000 64, 1.5GB ram, 300 gb hard drive, 512mb 7600 gs OC) Just wondering what I will need.

Thanks,
Sam

Sam,

I rendered a 5 minute clip the other day and it took 1 hour to render with the system I have. So if you have the time to wait then the system you have is fine. HD Video editing takes a lot of horsepower!!

Jae

[ib84]

hey guys!

you know what system i have? 1ghz G4 PPC, 512 Ram.... :-) you say you have to upgrade your machine?!?! Not at all.
What did you do exactly to render 5 min in 1 hour?!? 2 frames per second with your machine? you must have exported in H.264 with Quicktime. That?s the worst codec of all. you can easily avoid to upgrade by choosing your software carefully.
With my old and lousy system i encode with about 5 frames per second, you can calculate how much time it would take me to encode your clip? less than the half, but my machine is >a lot< slower than the half of yours...

Quicktime is practical for some things, but the codecs are ****... try out the links above. On MacOSX, you can also use Quicktime Components to use opensource codecs directly from within QT-compatible apps. don?t know if this exists for windows though. If not, you are still much faster coding to a mildly lossy codec like MJPEG, and then compress this to x264 or Xvid or whatever with the tools above.