Real-World HDV

How does JVC's $3,000 HDV camera Function in a Pro Workflow

When HDV arrived on the scene last year in a camera marketed by JVC, it was dismissed in some quarters as a prosumer format unsuitable for pro video applications. But look at what the format already offers - a $3,000 camera that records a 720p image to a MiniDV tape. Can pro videographers ignore this? Alton Christensen, co-owner of Edgeworx in New York City, doesn't think so. We asked him to investigate how HDV can be successfully integrated into an existing professional video post environment, and helped outfit him with the JVC JY-HD10U camera as well as software toolkits from Lumière HD and CineForm designed to get the footage out of the camera and into an NLE. "Six months from now, everything you're reading will have changed, Christensen warned us as this piece went to press, and that's another important thing to understand — HDV is, quite literally, in its formative stages. With JVC and Sony already showing trade-show prototypes of three-chip cameras, and Canon and Sharp waiting in the wings, it doesn't take a video engineer to figure out that HDV is poised to leave a big footprint in the wilds of HD production."

At Edgeworx, our mantra is that when you choose a format, you have to know how you’re going to finish it and deliver it. You have to know that before you shot a frame. In the early days of DVCPRO HD, people came to us literally in tears. They were crushed when they found there was no way to finish this beautiful acquisition format. Essentially, they spent $200 a tape to upconvert their VariCam footage to HDCAM — or, worse, downconvert to DigiBeta. HDV could be the same thing: a really interesting new acquisition format with no way to finish it. Once you get all that HD footage on tape, can you do anything with it in post? So I wanted to test HDV, to see if it’s ready for integration into a real-world professional post environment and also to find out how difficult that process is.

In order to make this a worthwhile test, and to get discussion going, I wanted to have a filmmaker involved. That’s very important, because HDV has to be understandable not just by the techno-geeks, but by the people actually trying to make decisions about what they’re going to shoot. The camera and post options all have to be considered from the very beginning. So Nancy Davis, an experienced corporate producer, shot interviews and table-tennis games for a short documentary she had in mind.

Here’s a basic rundown of the post-production workflow: After Nancy finished shooting, we pulled the HDV transport stream out of the camera and converted her footage to a QuickTime-compatible MPEG-2 stream. Those 720p files were loaded into Final Cut Pro and then batch exported to HD Offline RT clips. We gave her those files for editing. When I got the Final Cut project back, I needed to relink to the converted original files and then color-correct the HD source material.

Finally, we had to get the edited material off the computer and into a distributable format. You can transcode to HDCAM or DVCPRO HD. I also recommend backing up the HDV source tapes to D-VHS. It’s not the most robust tape format, but it is a clone of your original. The JVC HM-DH4000U deck I used is relatively cheap ( $540 retail) and D-VHS tapes are really inexpensive at $7.00 for three hours. Another benefit is that you can buy Hollywood movie titles for about $40— that’s in HD and 5.1 surround!

What I’ve tried to do here is to outline the steps needed to get material from an HDV source to a deliverable product. This discussion is actually NLE-agnostic. The key thing is converting the HDV camera original to a usable format for your edit — regardless of the brand of editor you use. In all instances, this requires the use of a third-party application. Some third-party applications integrate with editing software better than others. I am not endorsing one application over another, or even one platform over another. Whatever you are using, these third-party conversion products can accommodate you— if you put a little bit of effort into figuring it out. For the record, I tested Final Cut Pro, Premiere and Vegas. There are some software turnkey packages that plan to handle HDV natively, but that’s grist for another article.

Getting it Out of the Camera

First, you need to digitize the data stream from the camera. Once it’s on your hard disk, it’s up to you to decide how you want to deal with it. That’s where it all gets tricky; this is not for the technophobe. You can use QuickTime Pro (on Mac or Windows) to save the video and audio streams out as a new file, but what type of QuickTime file do you save? Do you export an MPEG-2 movie that Final Cut can read, or do you make your offline versions? You can load the footage into Final Cut as you would anything else— but you still can’t edit with it. You have to create an offline version of it using Apple’s Offline RT (which is a JPEG-compressed proxy format), edit the proxy footage, go back and conform to the high-quality footage, and then render that out to a format of your choice like DVCPRO HD. Got it? Honestly, it’s very confusing. (Some of my clips had audio sync problems, no doubt caused by operator error.)

The biggest drawback is that it ties up your Final Cut for however long it takes to do the Offline RT conversion, to make the edits in normal time, and then to render the conform. Even on a speedy machine, it takes a lot to make those RT Offlines.

Lumière HD

Lumière HD has a standalone application ( $179) designed to simplify the process. You simply play the tape and hit record, creating a transport stream file on your hard drive, and then the program steps you through the rest of the process in a very intuitive manner. The next step is converting that program stream into something you can use. Lumière demultiplexes it in a batch process, creating video and audio streams that can be converted into a file that will work on the Final Cut Pro timeline.

For doing this, Lumière offers three codec pre-sets. It will transcode to DVCPRO or DVCAM and, curiously enough, to Motion JPEG. Because it’s not clear exactly what that means, it would be nice if Lumière had specific options to convert to the RT Offline format. If Lumière linked to my Final Cut Pro presets— or even if it loaded its own presets into Final Cut— it would be easier to understand the nomenclature. Even though it’s not intuitive, this functionality is brilliant.

What’s more, there’s an option for creating an XML file for Final Cut Pro, which is very helpful. Drag that into Final Cut and, voilà you’ve got all your clips in a bin. It will even pre-set the clips to be anamorphic so you don’t have to do it manually. Then you edit normally, provided you’ve figured out how to relate your offline codec to your project codec. And then Lumière lets you take your online, encode it as a transport stream, and stream it back out to the camera or a D-VHS deck. In fact, you can continue to edit in Final Cut while all of this happens in the background. Obviously, it will run faster on a dual-processor machine, but if you’ve got some internal digitization and conversion stations, it can sit there and churn on an iMac or even an eMac overnight.

It takes time to go from step to step, but there is batching within each step. For example, converting a transport stream to a program stream can be batched, and converting the program stream to a timeline can also be batched. But it won’t automatically convert the program stream to a codec stream and create the XML for you. You have to step into the process manually to keep it going.

As I mentioned, one of the drawbacks is a lack of matching presets to FCP project presets (something that Lumière says will soon be resolved). I did sort out that I could convert my transport stream to DVCPRO HD and edit in real time using FCP’s built-in optimization. This allows me to see my HD image in real time on an HD CRT monitor by way of the Panasonic AJ-HD1200A for a more accurate color-correct. Additionally, I can output to this format without additional conversion, which is an advantage. Another advantage that you can have a facility dub your program from DVCPRO HD to, for example, D5 or an HDCAM 1080 upconvert for network and theatrical distribution at nominal cost and very little, if any, quality loss.

Other Ways to Capture

There are other ways to get the footage from your camcorder onto your Mac. I tested XtractorHDV from Heuris, which did the trick, but is no longer available. I also used a tiny little application called DVHSCap, which comes bundled with the software developer’s kit for OS X. The interface is a little different, but it has the same functionality. It allows me to connect to the D-VHS deck or to the camera. You can’t really do anything with the transport stream it captures, because you still have to convert it to something usable. But if you need multiple machines capturing transport streams, use this. (You may end up with a bottleneck, because the conversion process is not real-time.) And if you’ve got a tech department or access to an Apple geek with the OS X SDK, you can get it for free. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what you use to take the video off the tape as long as you manage to get it into Final Cut. It’s just a huge jump required to get it off the camera and into something you can actually edit.

Additionally, one of the biggest issues on the Mac side is the way QuickTime deals with MPEG. It takes forever to open an MPEG file because it first has to look at the entire group of frames, from beginning to end. If you digitize a 20-minute clip, QuickTime could take five minutes or so just to open that file. Using Lumière, I just learned to digitize in smaller pieces, doing five or 10 minutes of footage at a time.

WORKFLOW OVERVIEW

1. The camera records to tape an MPEG-2 transport stream, which most NLEs can’t directly edit.
2. The transport stream must be converted to something your editing system can handle— DVCPRO HD, a third-party card codec, or a third-party software codec, for example
3. Once the stream is converted, edit as usual.
4. After editing: Convert back to MPEG-2 transport stream for output to HDV (or DVHS, which utilizes the same MPEG format)
   OR play out DVCPRO HD to your deliverable format (the easiest is D5, or upconvert to HDCAM), or real-time HD card (such as Kona, Cinewave or Bluefish) to D5 or HDCAM.
5. Today's HDV sources do not have timecode, sp forget about a handy path back to the original source.

Cineform Aspect HD

On the PC, I tested CineForm’s Aspect HD ( $999), which is very similar to the Lumière product. Basically, you hit record, play your tape, and then hit stop. But what’s interesting is that Aspect HD actually goes into the next step and converts the program stream, then gives you options for selecting a timeline codec. The default is a 1280x720p file that uses a codec designed by CineForm for post applications with an AVI wrapper. When you first install Aspect HD, it adds its own presets to Adobe Premiere Pro, including the 1280x720p CineForm codec, which is really helpful. All you have to do is load those AVI files into Premiere, choose the right project pre-set and start editing.

In Premiere, I was actually editing a very high-quality MPEG stream converted to AVI at full resolution (much like working at full resolution with DVCPRO HD in Final Cut). At that point, it’s online quality. I was also impressed that I did not take a performance hit on the video. Working with a high-quality box off a RAID, I was able to watch, manipulate and edit video, scrubbing through it without a stutter.

The conform process from Premiere back out to D-VHS is also very smooth. You’re already at full resolution so there’s no matching back, and a simple automated step converts back to MPEG for lay-off to tape. CineForm works in the background, so you can do conversions while you’re editing. The only thing it’s missing is XML support.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out a way to watch the footage play out in real time on an HD CRT Monitor. I was using a Bluefish444 card, but the video’s obviously not using a Bluefish codec so it doesn’t play out— there’s no driver support at the moment. I could send it out to the D-VHS deck, but it would have to be rendered as a transport stream first, so I can’t go that route either. So I can edit on screen in full resolution, but I can’t watch full resolution on an HD CRT monitor, which you really need for a proper color-correct and to see what your output really looks like. You could arrange for the full resolution to playback on a secondary computer monitor.

Since there is no time code on the transport stream, there’s no way to put in a batch log, but CineForm comes close to that simply by breaking transport streams when transport streams break on the recording. That means you automatically get separate clips based on when you stopped and started the camera. It’s extraordinarily convenient.

I’m a Mac person, so I hate to admit this, but I’m being very honest: The workflow solution using CineForm Aspect HD and Premiere, as well as the quality of the image, is, hands down, the winner at the moment.

Choose Your Finishing Format

I suppose one of the more glaring questions here is why one would want to finish to D-VHS or HDV. Perhaps you have a deck sitting around. D-VHS decks, though relatively inexpensive, are not found often in most presentation or other post environments you’ll come across. Realistically, you’ll need to finish your masterpiece to a more widely used format, such as HDCAM, D5 or DVCPRO HD. On the Mac side, using Lumière HD and the DVCPRO HD codec will give you real-time full-resolution HD editing with an accessible output back to DVCPRO HD or D5, which can then be upconverted to HDCAM as needed. On the PC side, you’ll need an output card (Kona, Cinewave, etc) and the appropriate drivers. With that, you can play out real-time SDI to HDCAM or D5.

HDV’s Evolution

Being able to record HDV directly to a hard disk, instead of to tape, will have a big impact. I’m not sure what it will be yet. Maybe that means the camera doesn’t have to record a transport stream anymore. One of the biggest winners in this HDV revolution may be disk-drive manufacturers. You’re likely to need room to record a transport stream, convert that transport stream for online and offline finishing, and then, optionally, turn it back into a transport stream. You’ll have three or four streams of content for each project by the time it’s all done, and then you have to decide whether to save the original transport streams or delete them. Personally, I’d lean toward saving the original data, since D-VHS is not the world’s most robust tape format. If my tape gets munched, at least I’ll still have my digitized transport streams.

When three-chip HDV cameras ship, bringing with them a substantial improvement in image quality, this format will accelerate at a pace never seen before. I think adoption will happen faster than it did with DVCAM, and DVCAM was pretty quick once the three-chip cameras hit the market. Everybody dismissed that format initially because the first cameras were disappointing. But look at how much is shot on DVCAM today. HDV and its sure-to-be-improved descendants— HDVPRO or HDV2 or whatever you call them— will have a similar uptake in the industry. And here’s the really exciting part. You’re probably still talking about an HD camera that costs, at the high end, $20,000. Wow.

Vendor Feedback: CineForm

Aspect HD supports SD analog video monitoring through a graphics card with a separate S-video or composite output or a dual-head card that has a DVI-to-S-video or DVI-to-composite adapter cable. We have the most experience with the Matrox Parhelia or P750 cards, and both Nvidia and ATI have cards with similar features. Just direct the video overlay to a second monitor or to the NTSC output. The preview is NTSC, but color reproduction is exact. This solution is modestly priced (hundreds of dollars instead of thousands), and is appropriate for most users. For true HD monitoring, most of the above manufacturers offer multi-display cards that will output HD with DVI-to-component or VGA-to-component adapters.

At Siggraph, we showed a new card that provides HD component output from Aspect HD, allowing real-time timeline monitoring on an external HD monitor for color-correction. It will be very affordable compared to HD-SDI solutions. In the near future, we will announce our first HD-SDI solution.
- David Taylor, CEO, CineForm

Vendor Feedback: Lumière HD

Lumière HD allows users to edit on anything from a laptop to a dual G5. The DVCPRO HD codec even makes it possible to edit full-resolution HDV in the FCP timeline. This means full HDV frames can be viewed in real time on a second cinema display while editing!

The timeline codec and program stream steps are kept separate because, in some cases where minor edits are necessary, editors may wish to give up real-time benefits and cut the online program stream clips directly in FCP.

The XML feature automates importing clips into FCP, merging and syncing audio and video, flagging clips as anamorphic, and renaming clips according to the source program streams. This feature can save hours of prep work.

Upcoming revisions will include additional pre-sets that match the FCP pre-set list, more powerful XML integration (including complete logging info), and the ability to export to an HDV Transport Stream from the FCP timeline.
- Frederic Haubrich, president, Lumière HD