Recording Direct to Disk From the Canon XL H1

The Canon XL H1 camera just got a little more usable with the news that the gurus at CineForm and Wafian have worked up a direct-to-disk recording option for the camera’s HD-SDI output, meaning users can capture 24fps footage directly from the camera without HDV compression applied.

The XL H1 outputs 24-frame material (it’s not true 24p, but it’s acquired by running the camera’s interlaced CCDs at 48 Hz) as a 1080/60i signal with pulldown. CineForm’s signal analysis software looks at that HD-SDI signal and removes the redundant fields to recover the original 24 frames, and then record them to Wafian’s HR-1 disk recorder ($14,999) using the 10-bit CineForm Intermediate codec. That allows users to bypass the quality hit they would normally take in the HDV compression step. Once the footage has been recorded, users can work on 24p footage in Premiere Pro via CineForm’s Prospect HD software ($3,499 with HD-SDI ingest option).

“Some HD-SDI sources that deliver 60i from 24p footage mark the redundant fields in the stream for easy removal on the other end,” explains CineForm CEO David Taylor. “The Canon redundant fields are not marked, so we have to detect them first, then remove them. Although this requires a bit more signal processing on our end, it also means that the same algorithm will work for any similar oversampling.” In other words, CineForm can also detect and remove the extra fields in footage captured from the component outputs of the JVC HD100U, which also bypasses HDV compression, at 60p, 50p and 48p.

For more information, visit www.cineform.com and www.wafian.com.