HDV......not with Apple's Color?

[treyvollmer]

Forum,

The Color user manual shows that HDV is not on the list of working formats. Well, inspite ot this and the fact that others have been confirming that sad story, I'd like to hear it from you all here.

Has anyone found a way around this? I'm working on a project right now that was shot on my HV30 at 30p/HDV. It loads in to color fine, except that it looks more like 4:3 as opposed to 16:9 (the original aspect ratio). Not to go off on a tangent though.

My main questions are:

1. Who is working with HDV inside of Apple's Color?

2. What is your workflow?

3. And is your resolution/ quality holding up upon export?

Thanks,

Trey

[Erik Bien]

Trey,

I think the majority of FCS users are probably trans-coding to AIC or ProRes for this type of finishing work -- somebody better acquainted with the subtleties of post-prod in general, or Apple in particular could probably explain the "whys" better than I could.

[Dana Love]

What Erik said.

Most people use Compressor to flip from HDV to ProRes (because our hard drives are too big), which is handled fine by Color.

Trying to color correct HDV s a challenge, since it is highly compressed. When you work in Color, how does your roundtrip work? Does the sequence open correctly in Color?

I've only spent a couple of months working with Color, or mabe two dozen projects. (The joy of being the boss is I can nose in on stuff that looks tough, or is interesting to me, and then get laughed at when I foul it up.) In that time, I've been bitten by Color at the outset and at the end of the roundtrip, but never in he app itself -- the app may puke when you put stuff into it or when you try to pull stuff out of it, but it hasn't puked when I've been grading.

[treyvollmer]

Dana,

I really appreciate hearing back from you on this. Sometimes it's just good to know that there are others out there with similar workflows.

My roundtrip goes like this:

Capture>Export Quicktime Movies>Add new files to Compressor and Remove 3:2 Pulldown + add ProRes 422 Codec>Import new files to FCP>Export to Color>Grade>Send to FCP.

Everything seems to be okay, except for the aspect ratio. Instead of the original 16x9 I get a 4x3 aspect ratio. I'm able to change my timeline settings in FCP in order to stretch/ un-stretch (whatever you want to call it) my footage. But it never quite looks the same as the original.

Truthfully, I'm a little lost and I feel like I'm struggling so much to try and deliver the highest resolution/quality movie possible. I just want it to look great, man!

About the puking, I would have to agree. It either pukes on the way in or out, but not during the grading itself.

For me the unwanted change of my aspect ratio= puke. The HV30 is an amazing little camera and apple's FCS2 cost me $1500 bucks. I can't help but hope that this combination will eventually prosper.

If there is anyone out there at all who can help me find a reliable HDV/Color workflow, please make yourself be known.

Thank you to Dana Love and anyone else out there interested in helping out a young aspiring filmmaker.

Treyvon

[koolpenguin89]

Capture>Export Quicktime Movies

This is unnecessary. Just go into your capture scratch (Documents>Final Cut Pro Documents>Capture Scratch) and drag the clips into compressor. As for your aspect ratio, you must have a setting wrong somewhere.

Dylan

[ed bittof]

Another part of the issue is that HDV uses a temporal sort of compression called GOP (group of pictures), which is in great measure how it saves so much disk space.

Lord knows I'm going to mess up this explanation and get technically slaughtered for it, but the dummies gist of it is that between every, say, 15, frames, HDV doesn't actually have 15 distinct frames. It only describes the difference from the previous frame. Thus, a temporal compression--there aren't 15 frames. There's only one frame and 14 more that just describe what changed.

This can cause issues, for one example, with transitions (and of course, color correction).

When you convert to a format like ProRes, however, it uses only I-frames, in which every frame is a sort of distinct, anchor frame. Every frame is a frame. The compression comes in spatial compression within that frame (i.e. if a lot of the sky is the same blue tone, it can really compress that frame) but each frame stands on its own. Causes less issues in editing/color correcting, etc.

So I believe you could technically create a sequence in FCP and send it to Color, but you might not want to because of potential issues with the HDV.

Ed

[ed bittof]

I hate to bump this again (as I offered about a month or so ago but got little takers), but by using Apple's recommended settings for the HV20 -> Compressor, I've created one Compressor droplet that will remove the pulldown from the 1080i footage and saves a renamed copy back into the source folder, and another almost identical droplet that removes the pulldown and resizes the footage to 720p.

My workflow it to capture 1080i footage shot at 24p into FCP as HDV, then immediately go into my capture folder and drop my capture files onto my 720p droplet. Voila! 720 ProRes 24p footage with the right aspect ratio ready to use however I need.

If anybody has Compressor and wants the droplets, email me at ebittof AT comcast.net.


Cheers!

Ed

[treyvollmer]

Hey, Ed.

Do you own and use Color?

What have been your experiences with the application?

Also, why do you like to down res from 1080 to 720?

Thanks, man.

Trey

What Erik said.

Most people use Compressor to flip from HDV to ProRes (because our hard drives are too big), which is handled fine by Color.

Trying to color correct HDV s a challenge, since it is highly compressed. When you work in Color, how does your roundtrip work? Does the sequence open correctly in Color?

I've only spent a couple of months working with Color, or mabe two dozen projects. (The joy of being the boss is I can nose in on stuff that looks tough, or is interesting to me, and then get laughed at when I foul it up.) In that time, I've been bitten by Color at the outset and at the end of the roundtrip, but never in he app itself -- the app may puke when you put stuff into it or when you try to pull stuff out of it, but it hasn't puked when I've been grading.

[ed bittof]

I do use Color. In terms of color correction, I can really dig deep into the video like I'm used to in Photoshop. Color channels and curves make a ton of sense to me--still experimenting with nodes and attempting multiple grades on a clip and tracking, but the basic tools to me are great.

My experience, though, is fairly limited, so I purposely avoid what I've read are the pitfalls--i.e. Color doesn't handle speed adjustments very well, doesn't handle motion if you keyframe a clip or use Smoothcam, etc., and doesn't handle stacked video layers.

So--after I get all my footage into true 24p (720 in my case) with the droplets mentioned earlier, I take it to one video layer with all my motion, speed changes, etc. rendered out and reimported. After that, it round trips very well--no issues. But again, I haven't pushed my luck.

I use 720p because it keeps some of the flexibility and added pixels I want for, say, keyframing or Smoothcam, but doesn't take up gobs of hard drive space. I'm just a guy with an iMac and one 500GB external FireWire drive and have found that full ProRes 1080 is a space hog. My way, I still have the luxury of having some extra pixel overhead and will still have pristine quality when I ultimately export out to standard-def DVD (SD DVD) or web video for family and friends.

If I remember from my testing, 720 might have eaten half the disc space of 1080 in ProRes (not HQ), more or less? Somebody feel free to correct me on this.

I suppose there will come a day when I've got such valuable footage, I won't want to throw away a pixel when I transcode to ProRes, but for now and for me, 720 is the best compromise between storage and quality.

Ed

[treyvollmer]

Hey, Ed.

Have you experienced any problems with your aspect ratios after you send your projects to Color?

My 16x9 shows up as 4x3 in Color. Even worse, it's still 4x3 when it gets back to FCP.

Thanks in advance,

Trey

[Kegan Sant]

Hi, I was doing a google search and saw this thread, so I thought I'd add my two cents.

I shoot with an XH-A1, but it still uses the same HDV format as the HV20/30. This was the first time I've used Color and I hadn't been converting to ProRes. Leaving it in HDV and editing as is. I decided to try Color for some quick color correction for a trailer I was editing. It worked great and Color has loads of potential! I shot HD (16x9 natively) and edited as such. Import it into Color and it appears to be 16x9 there too. Great...then I did all my color correction, rendered it and chose to send it back to FCP.

This is where the problem happened, much like you folks. It gives me a 4x3 clip and that is unacceptable!

Would it have something to do with Color handling native HDV files incorrectly? Should I convert to ProRes, then send to Color? We can't be the only people who are having these issues. Surely, there's a solution out there - let's see if we can find it.

Thanks,

Kegan

[mattias]

if the pixel size is still 1440x1080 you haven't lost anything and can just reset the distort parameter in the motion tab.

/matt

[Kegan Sant]

It goes to 720 x 480. Since HDV is not one of the compatible formats, would converting to ProRes work?

-Kegan

[treyvollmer]

Kegan,

This is what I had to do.

FCP>Sequence>Settings>General Tab>Aspect Ratio>HD (1440x1080) (16:9).

Also make sure the pixel aspect ratio is set to 1440x1080 and leave anamorphic 16:9 UNCHECKED.

If this doesn't work you might have to experiment with some other settings until you get the desired ratio. Thats how I figured it out, I just kept trying different settings until I got my aspect ratio/resolution the way I wanted it.

Good luck,

Trey