IntroductionWhat this course covers and how to use it| 00:00 | Welcome to working with high-definition video in Final Cut Studio.
| | 00:04 | My name is Larry Jordan.
| | 00:06 | Our goal in this title is to help you understand
HD better so you can use it more effectively.
| | 00:12 | Now while the operation of Final Cut Studio is essentially
the same regardless of the video format you're editing,
| | 00:18 | working with high definition requires
special consideration during setup,
| | 00:22 | capture and output and goodness knows there is terminology
and technology to learn. So this title focuses on what
| | 00:30 | you need to know about working with high def.
| | 00:33 | It assumes you already have a working knowledge of Final Cut Pro
| | 00:36 | and if not, it'd probably be better to start with our other titles
on Essential Training in Final Cut or if you're interested
| | 00:43 | in transcoding, take a look at our Compressor 2 and
Compressor 3 titles because that'll make a huge difference as well.
| | 00:49 | I can tell you how many e-mails I get a day from people
who are struggling to figure out what's going on with HD.
| | 00:56 | And the reason it's so confusing, I realized as I was putting
this title together, there's over 400 different varieties of HD.
| | 01:04 | Using different frame sizes, frame rates, compression
formats, codec's, pixel aspect ratios, scan line.
| | 01:10 | And it seems like we're adding about five new formats
a month and that doesn't mean that all those formats
| | 01:16 | can be edited, much less the fact that the cameras
can be controlled. It's enough to just drive you nuts.
| | 01:23 | So here I think is the key point.
| | 01:26 | Unlike standard def, the high def video format that you shoot
will almost never be the video format that you distribute.
| | 01:33 | You shoot HDV, but you don't hand somebody an HDV tape.
You shoot XDCAM but you don't hand them a blue ray disc.
| | 01:39 | You shoot one format and you distribute a second.
| | 01:43 | So a knowledge of all these different HD formats is essential cause
you're essentially going to be working in two sides, the format that you
| | 01:48 | use for acquisition, what you shoot, and the
format that you use for editing and distribution
| | 01:54 | and many times there's a significant disconnect between those two.
| | 01:58 | So in this title I'll give you an understanding
of basic HD terms and technology.
| | 02:04 | I'll show you how to choose an acquisition format and what
the hardware requirements are for Final Cut Studio including
| | 02:10 | some special hardware that you need for HD.
| | 02:13 | I'll also give you a sense of what HD workflows are, not
just for high def, but for transcoding and I'll share with you
| | 02:19 | some thoughts on how to achieve a film look for your videos.
| | 02:23 | Then we'll get our hands into Final Cut Pro and show how to
get HD into Final Cut, whether it's HDV or DVC Pro HD or XD
| | 02:31 | CAM HD, or XT CAM EX or uncompressed HD or even
image sequences coming out of a 3-D studio package.
| | 02:39 | Then we'll talk about ways of optimizing and speeding up our
editing and our rendering, look for the best ways to output
| | 02:45 | and export our files and wrapup with a discussion of
transcoding as we change from one format to the next.
| | 02:51 | So there's a lot to talk about.
| | 02:54 | If you're a premium member of the Lynda.com Online Training
Library or if you're watching this tutorial on a disc then
| | 03:00 | you have access to the exercise files that I use in this title.
| | 03:04 | If on the other hand you a monthly or annual subscriber to
Lynda.com then you don't have access to the exercise files,
| | 03:11 | but you can follow along using your own assets.
| | 03:14 | If you do have a Lynda.com Premium membership or
you're on a disc, I just want to illustrate one thing.
| | 03:21 | Copy the Exercise File folder to your desktop.
| | 03:25 | Inside it you'll find a Projects folder and a Media folder.
Everything you need is in those two folders, but you need to
| | 03:32 | copy it to your desktop. The Web and the DVD is
nowhere near fast enough to make this thing work.
| | 03:39 | It's about 2 GB in size, it'll take a while, but
it's going to make running this project a lot easier.
| | 03:45 | Well that's sort of the organization of this title. Let's get
ourselves started and we'll do that by looking at some key terms
| | 03:51 | and technology.
| | 03:53 | That is next.
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| Avoiding confusion when using the exercise files| 00:00 | One more thing to avoid confusion on these exercise files,
this is an advanced Final Cut Studio title so it assumes some
| | 00:06 | CAMbasic knowledge of the operation of Final Cut. I won't explain
every possible step like how to create a sequence as we go through.
| | 00:13 | As well, you may not have all the HD gear that we use such
as HDV decks or capture cards, which means that some of
| | 00:19 | these exercises won't work on your system.
| | 00:22 | We illustrate how to ingest P2 and XD CAM HD material. Because
these source files are enormous, the P2 media was 8 GB and
| | 00:30 | the XD CAM HD was 9.5 GB. We just can't include them
on the exercise files. You'd be downloading forever.
| | 00:37 | So what we've done instead is to provide already captured footage
in a variety of formats you can see how these particular
| | 00:44 | video formats work within Final Cut Pro.
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1. Understanding HDHD checklist| 00:00 | Some things you're about to discover
| | 00:02 | is that HD is not a single format or file or
size or anything. There's lots and lots of
| | 00:10 | different settings that are involved.
| | 00:12 | This means that as you're working with HD, especially as you
get started, you should put together a checklist to keep
| | 00:18 | track of all the different settings that you're using.
| | 00:21 | This HD checklist is going to vastly simplify your workflow
because it eliminates confusion. It makes sure that your
| | 00:27 | settings are correct during capture and if you've got a support
issue you can say more than "Well I'm working with HD."
| | 00:33 | You can tell them exactly the frame size, you can tell
them exactly the frame rate, you can tell them exactly
| | 00:38 | what the support staff needs to know to able to solve your problem.
| | 00:42 | So let's start putting together this HD checklist.
| | 00:45 | I can help you by giving you the answers to 10 questions
| | 00:48 | to help you understand HD.
| | 00:51 | Those questions are next.
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| HD overview| 00:00 | Let's begin our exploration with high-definition by answering
10 common questions. Now these questions are the same whether
| | 00:07 | you're using Final Cut or some other editing
software, whether you're on a Mac or PC.
| | 00:11 | It's just sort of a basic understanding of what HD is. We'll talk
about what is high-definition video, what are common HD formats,
| | 00:19 | what are common file storage sizes,
| | 00:21 | what are common HD image sizes.
| | 00:24 | What's progressive versus interlaced scanning?
| | 00:27 | What are HD frame rates and pixel aspect ratios?
| | 00:30 | What methods are used for storing HD video and are some of
the common compression formats and common distribution formats?
| | 00:38 | I started this slide with only three questions and the more
I thought about it, the more questions we needed to answer
| | 00:43 | before we can even begin to tackle the process of editing HD.
| | 00:46 | So let's start with what is high-definition video?
| | 00:49 | And that's next.
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| What is high-definition video?| 00:00 | Let's start with the easy one first, what is high-definition?
| | 00:04 | Well high-definition is video which provides greater image
clarity, greater resolution than standard definition video.
| | 00:11 | At present depending on how you count, there are over 400 different HD formats.
| | 00:17 | Now, I calculated this based upon taking all the different
image sizes and all the different frame rates and all the
| | 00:22 | difference scanning and all the different codecs and all the
different formats... Well we got over 400 different varieties
| | 00:29 | That's why when someone says congratulations to
me, I bought a new HD camera, now how do I use it?
| | 00:34 | It's a virtually impossible to answer question.
| | 00:37 | For instance, all HDV video is HD,
but not all HD video is HDV.
| | 00:44 | HDV is a subset of HD.
| | 00:48 | Well that's enough to get us started. Let's
take a look now at some common HD formats.
| | 00:54 | Next.
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| Common HD formats| 00:00 | While it's easy to explain what high-definition is,
| | 00:03 | when we start to implement it, things get wildly out of control.
| | 00:07 | For instance, here are just 10 HD formats which are commonly
available, starting with HDV and DVCPro HD working through
| | 00:15 | ProRes and HDCAM SR at the high end and some
of the new formats of AVC-Intra and AVCHD.
| | 00:22 | These HD formats divide into two broad categories,
those which are I-frame based and those which are GOP-based.
| | 00:28 | And we'll be talking more about this
compression a little bit later in this training.
| | 00:32 | There's four that are I-frame compressed DVCPro HD,
ProRes, HDCAM and HDCAM SR and I-frame is easier to edit
| | 00:39 | and generally quicker, but the file sizes are bigger.
| | 00:43 | GOP files are smaller, but sometimes
can be much, much harder to edit,
| | 00:47 | and that has an impact on us when we're trying
to meet deadlines using our high definition work.
| | 00:51 | But there's more than just different HD formats.
| | 00:54 | There's also different file storage sizes
| | 00:57 | and we'll talk about those next.
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| Common HD file sizes| 00:00 | Different HD formats have different file sizes and
different data rates. A data rate measures the speed
| | 00:07 | the data is coming off the hard disk
| | 00:09 | and the file size indicates how much storage
is necessary say to store an hour of material.
| | 00:14 | HDV tends to be very small. It's at less than 4 MB a second
for data transfer and it's about 13 GB to store an hour.
| | 00:22 | But when you've got something that small, a lot of information
is being thrown away. For some people, the information being
| | 00:27 | thrown away is acceptable; for other people the information
being thrown away is not. It isn't that there's a right or
| | 00:33 | wrong answer. As long as you understand what the
differences are, you can then make an informed decision.
| | 00:39 | But don't assume that HDV is the same as ProRes is the
same as HDCAM SR. They are radically different formats,
| | 00:46 | and part of the reason they are different is because of the
file size, the compression that they use, is throwing away
| | 00:51 | different elements of the information.
| | 00:53 | Now when you're ready to start shooting and the producer says
that you want to shoot a 10 hour documentary using DVCPro HD,
| | 01:00 | you can do the math. 10 hours times 48 GB means
that at a minimum to store all that information,
| | 01:06 | you're going to need a 500 GB hard drive or drives.
| | 01:09 | And you should always have a 20% overhead on your drive for
file storage so that means that you're probably looking at a
| | 01:15 | 750 GB drive just to store your material,
build your render files and work efficiently.
| | 01:20 | Take a look at some of these other formats, which are also in
varying sizes. This helps you to decide what kind of drive
| | 01:26 | space you're going to need and helps you then to make sure that
you're all set to start the project before you get halfway
| | 01:31 | through and suddenly realize your drives are full
and your organizational scheme is screwed up and
| | 01:36 | you're stuck.
| | 01:37 | It's always nice to plan a little bit before you start
| | 01:40 | and this table can help, but there's still more that we
need to learn. Not only are there common file storage sizes,
| | 01:46 | there's also common image sizes.
| | 01:48 | We'll talk about those next.
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| Common HD image sizes| 00:00 | Just as we have a variety of HD formats
and a variety of HD file sizes,
| | 00:05 | we also have a variety of HD image sizes.
| | 00:09 | This is a standard television that we watch
every night, standard definition NTSC 720x480.
| | 00:15 | Well actually, not quite true.
| | 00:18 | Standard broadcast television is 720x486.
The image size that we put onto an NTSC DVD is 720x480
| | 00:25 | and if we're dealing with PAL, it's 720x576.
| | 00:29 | But for the purpose of this comparison,
we'll work with NTSC at 720x480.
| | 00:34 | By a comparison here is one HD size.
| | 00:39 | This is HD 1280x720.
| | 00:42 | When we're talking with HD, we're talking the last number,
the vertical resolution. 720 means that it's 1280 pixels across
| | 00:50 | by 720 pixels high, and we call that the 720 format.
| | 00:54 | The next HD size is a little bit bigger. It's 1920 pixels across
| | 00:59 | and 1080 pixels high, called 1080.
| | 01:03 | So 720 HD is the middle box, 1080 HD is the larger box.
| | 01:08 | The advantage to 720 is the file sizes are smaller.
| | 01:12 | The advantage to 1080 is the pictures are bigger,
| | 01:15 | but HD doesn't stop here.
| | 01:17 | We have another size, which is commonly
used for film intermediates called 2K.
| | 01:22 | 2048 pixels across by somewhere around 1556 pixels high.
| | 01:27 | Cropping can change the vertical dimension. We call this
the 2K image and you may have for about the red camera
| | 01:34 | which everybody is excited about.
| | 01:36 | The red camera gives us 4000 pixels across by 2304
pixels high, when it's shooting in a 16x9 mode.
| | 01:45 | As you can imagine, as your image sizes increase, render times
also increase because there's more pixels that have to be rendered.
| | 01:52 | So another thing that you have to keep in mind as you're
working with HD is if you're doing a lot of effects work,
| | 01:58 | you need to budget the time for rendering of your effects because
a 1080 image is going to take six to eight times longer to render.
| | 02:05 | Just because there's that many more pixels.
| | 02:08 | But it's not just the image size which is contributing to all
the confusion with HD. We also have different scanning formats.
| | 02:16 | We'll talk about those next.
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| Progressive vs. interlaced| 00:00 | There are two ways a video image can be displayed:
| | 00:03 | progressive and interlaced.
| | 00:05 | Both standard def and high def digital
video is composed of lines of pixels,
| | 00:10 | and there are two ways these lines are displayed.
| | 00:12 | A process we call scanning.
| | 00:14 | You can display all the lines
at one time, which is progressive.
| | 00:17 | Or you can display the lines in
alternating groups called interlacing.
| | 00:21 | Now both NTSC and PAL are interlaced.
| | 00:25 | However, film is progressive. Film takes the entire image at
one time. NTSC and PAL take half the lines at one instant,
| | 00:33 | and the other half of the lines at the next instant.
| | 00:36 | In the case of NTSC, we take each of those interlaced lines
1/60th of a second apart. We combine the odd numbered lines
| | 00:44 | and even numbered lines into a frame.
| | 00:46 | Same thing with PAL except it works at 50 fields
a second, combining them into 25 frames.
| | 00:52 | Same concept exists for HD.
| | 00:55 | Some HD images are progressive.
| | 00:58 | Some are interlaced.
| | 01:00 | If they end with the letter I, they're interlaced.
| | 01:03 | If they end with the letter P, they're progressive.
| | 01:06 | The advantage to progressive is it
shows rapid movement much more clearly.
| | 01:11 | The advantage to interlaced is it evens out the data flow,
which makes it a whole lot easier to transmit both for cable
| | 01:18 | and for broadcasters.
| | 01:20 | There's two kinds of interlacing. There's even field dominant
and there's odd field dominant. Notice in the middle picture,
| | 01:26 | the green lines are on all the even numbered lines.
2, 4, 6, 8. And the even numbered lines are displayed first,
| | 01:32 | and a 60th of a second later the odd numbered lines
are displayed. This is a way that DV works in NTSC.
| | 01:39 | Odd field dominant means that all the odd numbered lines
are displayed first followed by the even numbered lines and
| | 01:45 | this field dominance is how it works inside HDV.
| | 01:48 | Most of the time, you don't need to worry about field dominance,
but you do need to worry about whether it's interlaced or not.
| | 01:54 | A progressive image can slow motion and
more importantly still frame with no flicker.
| | 01:59 | An interlaced image, when it still frames, can
flicker if there's any movement inside the frame,
| | 02:05 | which means we have to de-interlace and de-interlacing
generally removes image quality by making the image softer.
| | 02:11 | There's not a right or wrong answer on progressive versus
interlaced. We just have two different ways of scanning
| | 02:17 | and we have to pay attention to the differences and
sometimes, progressive generally leads to clearer pictures;
| | 02:23 | interlaced makes for easier transmission.
| | 02:25 | Lots of choices, no standard.
| | 02:28 | But there's more than just scanning involved because we've got
different frame rates, how many pictures we see each second.
| | 02:36 | And that's next.
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| Frame rates| 00:00 | Well as we are continuing to put our checklist
together, it should probably surprise no one
| | 00:05 | that HD does not run at a single frame rate.
| | 00:08 | In fact, it runs at a variety of different frame rates.
In NTSC countries it'll run a 23.98, 29.97, 30, 59.94 and 60.
| | 00:18 | In PAL countries, it tends to run on the 23.98, 25 and 50.
| | 00:23 | 23.98, which is actually 23.967 just rounded up a little
bit, 23.98 is the rate that we would shoot if we wanted a
| | 00:31 | film look. If we wanted to do film transfers. Film transfers
will also go from 24 frame in film to 23.967 on tape.
| | 00:40 | The most common speed so are 23.98, 59.94
and 60 for NTSC and 23.98 and 50 for PAL.
| | 00:50 | Also, to confuse matters even further, some HD
formats use drop frame timecode and some don't.
| | 00:57 | [Sighs] Why should life be easy?
| | 01:00 | And thinking of an easy life,
| | 01:03 | it's about to get worse.
| | 01:04 | Because the pixels aren't even square.
| | 01:07 | They're rectangles.
| | 01:09 | We'll be talking more about that a little later in this title.
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| Understanding pulldown| 00:00 | Making things even more complicated as we start to talk
about frame rates is the whole issue of pull-down frames.
| | 00:06 | Pul-down frames are used when playing back 24 frame
per second material on 30 frame NTSC systems.
| | 00:13 | Pull-down frames aren't used in PAL.
We just actually speed this stuff up about 4%.
| | 00:18 | A pull-down frame contains duplicates of existing fields.
This means that it contains no new picture information,
| | 00:25 | and the way these pull-down frames are constructed is called
the cadence and there are three cadences. I mean why should
| | 00:31 | there be one? Let's try to make this is confusing as possible.
We've got 2-3-2-3, which is the old-style telecine cadence.
| | 00:38 | 2-3-3-2, which is used by the Panasonic P2,
| | 00:42 | and 2-2-2-4, which is the fastest for the computer
to deconstruct, but rarely used by cameras.
| | 00:48 | Let me illustrate this in a little more detail
so you understand what the whole problem is.
| | 00:52 | This top row of squares represents one
second of video at 30 frames a second.
| | 00:57 | The second row of squares represents
24 frames over that same second
| | 01:01 | and look at what happens every five frames at 30 frames.
| | 01:05 | The frame boundary lines up exactly with- well, it would line up
exactly if I could draw- it lines up exactly with the 24 frame.
| | 01:13 | This means to what we've got to do to get 24 frames to fill
30 frames, we've got to expand four frames to become five.
| | 01:21 | Well if we look at each individual frame,
each frame in the low left corner contains two fields.
| | 01:27 | There's the top field, the odd numbered line
and the even numbered line at the bottom.
| | 01:32 | So how do we take these eight fields and stretch
them so their content fits into 10 fields?
| | 01:38 | Well, what we do is we add one frame every four
frames, which is composed of duplicated fields,
| | 01:44 | and that's where that cadence comes from.
| | 01:46 | Look at the top line in the center. The top cadence is 2-3-2-3.
| | 01:50 | Two A's, three B's, two C's, three D's.
| | 01:53 | The problem is if you look at that cadence,
there's not a single frame which is just C.
| | 01:59 | I got one frame which is B and C and one frame
which is C and D, but not just a pure C.
| | 02:04 | This means the computer's got to totally deconstruct all
the individual fields and re-interlace. So when you're going
| | 02:11 | from taking the pull-down frames out from 30 frames down
to 24, this makes it hard for the computer to calculate.
| | 02:18 | Take a look at the second line. 2 A's followed by two B's,
followed by a B/C, followed by two C's followed by two D's.
| | 02:25 | This is the 2-3-3-2 pull-down. I've got two A's, three B's,
three C's and two D's. The cool part about this is notice that
| | 02:33 | middle frame, which is B and C? All the computer has to do
is pull the whole frame out, collapse it and you can easily
| | 02:38 | move from 30 frames down to 24, or 24 up to 30. The
calculation is much faster, which is one of the reasons
| | 02:45 | Panasonic adopted it for its camera.
| | 02:47 | The absolute fastest way to stretch four frames to five is
to simply duplicate the last frame. Notice in the last row
| | 02:54 | we've got two A's, two B's, two C's, and four D's.
| | 02:57 | The problem is if you got anything that's got movement,
that's smooth to jerky, smooth to jerky, smooth to jerky.
| | 03:02 | It looks terrible for movement, but boy, it's fast to
calculate and fast to make the frame appear and disappear.
| | 03:08 | For the absolute smoothest movement, probably the 2-3-2-3
pull-down is best but the 2-3-3-2 is so easy to be able to change
| | 03:16 | frame rates from 24 to 30 that we're seeing
a lot of the new cameras are using that.
| | 03:20 | It's enough to make your eyes glaze over
and probably more than you ever wanted to know.
| | 03:25 | But this is what pull-down frames are. We're constructing
imaginary frames out of real frames to stretch 24 frames into
| | 03:32 | 30 frames and notice that we still have the same duration,
it's just how long each frame lasts, a 24th of a second
| | 03:39 | or 30th of a second, that makes this whole process work.
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| Pixel aspect ratios| 00:00 | If you've ever tried to create graphics on your computer
and import them into video, you discovered that the pixels
| | 00:06 | the computer uses are not the same shape as the pixels that
video uses. In fact, the computer uses square pixels and
| | 00:13 | video uses rectangular pixels and this has an
impact on exporting and graphics and still frames.
| | 00:19 | For instance, take a look at the square
on the top left. This is a computer pixel.
| | 00:24 | It's one unit high by one unit wide.
| | 00:26 | If we're shooting NTSC standard definition 16x9,
| | 00:31 | the pixel isn't one unit high by one unit side.
It's actually 1.2 units wide by one unit high.
| | 00:37 | It's kind of short and fat.
| | 00:39 | If we look at PAL 16x9 in standard def, it's 1.42
units wide by one unit high. It is short and fat.
| | 00:48 | Just because the SD pixels are not square you'd think
that they'd solve this with HD, but you'd be wrong.
| | 00:54 | An HDV 1080 pixel is 1.33 units wide by
one unit high and a DVCPro HD 720 pixel
| | 01:02 | is 1.5 units wide and one unit high.
| | 01:06 | What this means is that now when you're converting graphics,
you want to make sure that you're paying attention
| | 01:12 | to the pixel aspect ratio.
| | 01:14 | I'd love to say that there's a single easy answer for all graphics.
| | 01:18 | In general however, you want to create your graphic at the
final image size. If it's going into a 720 P piece video then
| | 01:25 | you'd want a create your graphic at 1280x720 and
it will get appropriately scaled inside Final Cut.
| | 01:32 | If it doesn't work, then you need to look
at the individual pixel aspect ratios.
| | 01:36 | Also keep in mind when you export an image, it's going to
export out of Final Cut at the rectangular pixel aspect ratio.
| | 01:44 | Well, except for version 6.02.
| | 01:46 | Apple made a secret change inside Final Cut 6.02
so that when you export an image out of say,
| | 01:53 | HDV or out of DVCPro HD, it automatically rescales the image
and converts it from rectangular pixels to square pixels.
| | 02:02 | This is a cool thing because the image comes out looking good,
but it's the wrong size if you ever wanted to reimport it
| | 02:08 | back to video again.
| | 02:10 | You need to keep these different images in mind because
you'll suddenly find that an image changes shape.
| | 02:16 | HDV inside video is 1440x1080. When you export it,
it becomes suddenly, magically, 1920x1080.
| | 02:24 | DVCPro HD 720 is actually 960x720, but
when it gets exported it becomes 1280x720.
| | 02:32 | And it's all due to the fact these pixels have different shapes.
| | 02:38 | Well, if that doesn't make your head hurt,
we've got even more stuff going on because
| | 02:42 | there's different methods that we use for storing HD video.
| | 02:46 | We'll talk about that
| | 02:48 | next.
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| Image bit depth| 00:00 | It's not technically true to say that bit depth is
just for HD. Actually bit depth is for all video images,
| | 00:06 | all computer images for that matter.
| | 00:09 | The depth determines the number of shades of
color or grayscale that an image can represent.
| | 00:14 | The higher the bit depth, the more accurately the image will
represent reality. However, you also get larger file sizes.
| | 00:21 | Compositing benefits from greater bit depth, so does chroma keying
and color correction, but most HD formats are not high bit depth.
| | 00:30 | Most of them are 8-bit formats.
| | 00:32 | HDV, DVCPro HD, XDCAM HD EX, HDCAM,
AVC-Intra, AVC HD, all of these are 8-bit formats.
| | 00:41 | The benefit is the file sizes are smaller, but
their use in compositing can generate some problems.
| | 00:47 | 10-bit formats include ProRes 422, some
HDCAM formats and some HDCAM SR formats.
| | 00:54 | 12-bit formats include HDCAM SR, the red camera and computer images.
| | 00:59 | If you're going to be selecting HD to just shoot images then 8-bit
is going to be perfectly okay. If you're shooting HD because
| | 01:07 | you want to do a lot of compositing and a lot of special
effects, 8-bit images are going to get you in trouble.
| | 01:12 | Keep that in mind as you're building your checklist,
as you deciding what format of HD to use
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| Hard disk speeds| 00:00 | Probably nothing contributes more to the performance of your
system than the speed of your hard disk. However, not
| | 00:06 | all hard disks are created the same and
they are definitely not connected the same.
| | 00:10 | Every hard disk is a bit different. So consider these
as general guidelines, not as hard and fast rules.
| | 00:16 | Hard disks slow down as they get filled up, so try to leave
about 20% free space on your drive. The emptier your drive,
| | 00:23 | the faster your data transfers will go.
| | 00:26 | Also FireWire drive speed is determined by how many drives
are attached to your computer and what speeds that they run.
| | 00:33 | I tend to recommend against having more than about five
FireWire drives attached to your computer. They start to spend
| | 00:38 | more time talking to each other
than delivering data to your computer.
| | 00:42 | Also FireWire drives will slow down
when your camera is also attached.
| | 00:47 | Where possible, you want to increase FireWire transfer speed
by connecting the hard drives to a separate PCI card.
| | 00:54 | Simply changing the ports that your FireWire drives are connected
to on your computer has no impact on speed or performance.
| | 01:02 | Here's a table that you can use to judge drive speed. Keep in
mind that these are estimates and every hard disk is a little
| | 01:08 | bit different.
| | 01:10 | If you're connecting your hard drive via USB,
it will not be fast enough to edit video on a Macintosh.
| | 01:16 | A FireWire 400 drive is going to deliver
data between 22 and 30 MB per second.
| | 01:22 | FireWire 800 between 42 and 50 MB a second. A SATA
connection, which requires a PCI card, 65 to 90 MB a second
| | 01:31 | for a single drive and you can get faster if you have a RAID.
| | 01:34 | A fiber channel connection will give you between 200
and 1400 MB per second, however it will require a RAID.
| | 01:43 | Here's why these numbers are important. Remember we talked earlier
about the different transfer rates between the different HD formats?
| | 01:49 | Well let's say that I'm dissolving between two
HDV clips. That's roughly 4 MB a second per clip.
| | 01:56 | But if I'm doing a dissolve, I'm running both those clips at
the same time. That means I need to have a hard drive that pulls
| | 02:01 | 8 MB a second of data off the hard drive.
| | 02:04 | Well, HDV is tiny and we can do that
even with a single FireWire 400 drive.
| | 02:09 | But let's say I'm working with DVCPro HD. That's 15 MB a second.
Times a dissolve of 2, that's 30 MB a second my hard drive
| | 02:17 | has to support to be able to do DVCPro HD.
| | 02:21 | Now we're reaching the limits of what
a single FireWire 400 drive can do.
| | 02:25 | Let's say I'm doing a dissolve between ProRes at say 27 MB
a second. That's 54 MB a second plus a 20% bandwidth reserve.
| | 02:34 | I need to be able to deliver 75 MB a second off
my hard drive. FireWire 400 can't support that.
| | 02:40 | It answers key questions like what format requires what
kind of hard drive speed with what kind of performance?
| | 02:47 | Say you're doing multi-clip work.
| | 02:48 | A multi-clip running multiple images at the same time,
each one of those images has its own data stream and that's
| | 02:54 | going start to add up, really taxing your hard disk performance.
| | 02:58 | It's all related, but in order for your system to work
properly you've got to have drives that are fast enough
| | 03:04 | and this table starts to get you in that general direction.
| | 03:08 | Again these are reasonable estimates and as they say on the
web, your mileage may vary. Technology changes constantly so
| | 03:15 | specific numbers will change.
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| Storage media| 00:00 | In the old days there was tape. We would simply point the camera,
we would at the record button and a whirring sound would
| | 00:06 | indicate that we were recording on tape.
| | 00:09 | Tape seems to be going the way of the dodo and
the carrier pigeon. It's just plain disappearing.
| | 00:15 | In fact there's lots of different ways we can store our HD
media. We can store today on tape, which HDV uses and some of
| | 00:22 | these other formats. We can store at the hard disk.
| | 00:25 | We can store up to flash memory,
| | 00:27 | we can even store it to optical media.
| | 00:30 | A couple weeks ago I was having a conversation
with the Director of Marketing for Sony cameras.
| | 00:35 | And we are talking and I was- alright, I was accusing
him, of Sony trying to just make things really difficult
| | 00:41 | for us by having all these different video formats and he
said something I thought was relevant to our discussion today.
| | 00:47 | He said, imagine if you will that all
of a sudden tomorrow there was no wood.
| | 00:51 | All the trees had disappeared.
| | 00:53 | What would you use to replace wood?
| | 00:55 | Well if you think about it, wood is used in a wide variety
of different ways. You couldn't replace wood in just one
| | 01:02 | single substance, probably be a bunch of different substances.
| | 01:05 | Tape has worked pretty well, but tape has got its limitations
and as we're moving into these new formats we have to find
| | 01:11 | some other way of storing an tape.
| | 01:13 | Problem is tape works really well for video. What do we replace
it with? And we're still trying to experiment. Is it flash memory?
| | 01:20 | Is it hard disks, is it optical media, is it a new form of tape?
| | 01:24 | I thought that was a good answer.
| | 01:26 | I'm not necessarily sure I agree with all of it but the
idea that the manufacturers are struggling to find the best
| | 01:31 | way of replacing tape, I think makes a lot of sense.
| | 01:34 | So why is it relevant to us? Because can you imagine a producer
walking up to you and giving you a hard disk and giving you
| | 01:40 | some tape and giving you flash memory and giving you optical
media and say, "Here's my program make. Something of it"?
| | 01:47 | Yeah, it happens to me on a daily basis actually. Well, you might
as well start to plan and well, if I get a hard disk, how am I going
| | 01:54 | connect it? If I get flash memory, how am I going to connect it?
| | 01:56 | What it means it is is that as soon as know that you're going
be doing a project, you need to figure out what kind of media
| | 02:02 | you're going to be getting and make sure
you've got the necessary hardware to support it.
| | 02:06 | This means that you have to be out in front of the production.
You've got to talk to the producer before they start to shoot
| | 02:12 | scene one to make sure that what ever they
shoot you can ingest and pull into your system.
| | 02:17 | This is just a rhetorical question, this is the 'I'm on
deadline and I can't load anything into the system because
| | 02:23 | I'm missing a stupid cable system!' question.
| | 02:27 | Anyway, lots of choices.
| | 02:29 | And it's going to continue to get worse before it gets better.
| | 02:32 | Ask questions first,
| | 02:33 | take good notes
| | 02:35 | and add this to your checklist.
| | 02:38 | We're going to talk compression.
| | 02:39 | Next.
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| HD compression| 00:00 | There are two ways we can reduce the size of a video image. Not
the size in terms of pixels at the size in terms of how much
| | 00:07 | storage is required.
| | 00:09 | That way to reduce the file size is called compression,
| | 00:13 | and the two types of HD compression are
I-frame and GOP, or group of pictures.
| | 00:18 | An I-frame based video means that
every image on the video was complete.
| | 00:23 | All compression occurs within the image, not between the images.
| | 00:27 | I-frame based video tends to provide higher
image quality, but it also has larger file sizes
| | 00:33 | Group of pictures compression is entirely different.
| | 00:37 | The first image in a group of pictures,
which is called the I-frame, is complete.
| | 00:41 | The remaining frames are essentially text documents describing
how the pixels of moved from the initial I-frame to
| | 00:49 | the current frame.
| | 00:50 | Those succeeding frames are called B and P frames.
| | 00:54 | Sufficient to say the B and the P frame is not an actual
image. It's a description of how the components of that
| | 01:03 | particular frame have changed, but it is not the image itself.
| | 01:07 | Because of this GOP compression makes files very small,
but it has issues with timecode and frame accuracy along with
| | 01:14 | potentially lower image quality.
| | 01:17 | In general less expensive cameras tend to use GOP compression;
| | 01:21 | higher quality cameras, which translates into
more expensive, tend to use I-frame compression.
| | 01:27 | I-frames will also render faster
| | 01:30 | and output faster.
| | 01:33 | There's one more thing we need to put on
our checklist and it doesn't do with HD itself.
| | 01:39 | It deals with we're going distribute HD,
| | 01:42 | because as you would expect by now, there's
not one single distribution format for HD.
| | 01:48 | There are three.
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| Conforming| 00:00 | The reason we care about making a distinction between
I-frame based compression and Long-GOP based compression
| | 00:07 | can be reduced to one word:
| | 00:09 | conforming.
| | 00:10 | Conforming is the process of preparing a
Long-GOP based format for either output or export.
| | 00:16 | Examples of Long-GOP based media include
HDV, XDCAM HD and HDCAM EX.
| | 00:23 | The reason this is so significant is that conforming doesn't
exist in I-frame media. We've never had to deal with it in
| | 00:28 | standard def, beta SP digi beta,
| | 00:31 | NTSC DV or PAL DV. All of those are I-frame based media.
| | 00:35 | But Long-GOP, we've got a convert from what we're
doing to edit back into that Long-GOP based media
| | 00:42 | and conforming can take four to 10 times longer than real
time depending upon the resolution of your HD image, the number
| | 00:50 | of edits and the speed of your processer. Four to 10 times longer.
| | 00:55 | Now, we only need to conform when we're getting ready to
output. We don't have to do it during editing so it disappears
| | 01:01 | during editing but if I output the sequence and I change just
one shot, I've got to re-conforme the entire sequence again.
| | 01:09 | Four to 10 times longer than real time.
| | 01:11 | If time is more important than money, then you want to make
sure you don't work with a Long-GOP based format because you're
| | 01:17 | going to be spending all your time waiting for it to conform.
| | 01:20 | If money is more important than time, then most of the
Long-GOP based formats are less expensive than I-frame based
| | 01:27 | and you'll save money by buying a less expensive format.
| | 01:31 | There's not a right answer. It's the answer that's most right
for you and conforming can make a huge difference. If you're in
| | 01:38 | a deadline driven environment, conforming to make
the difference between making those deadlines are not.
| | 01:44 | It needs to be on your checklist.
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| Common distribution formats| 00:00 | After everything else we've learned about HD it should probably
not surprise anyone to realize that there is no standard
| | 00:06 | distribution format for HD anywhere in the world either.
| | 00:10 | You actually have three choices.
| | 00:12 | The first is you can take your high-definition show
and you can convert it to a standard definition DVD.
| | 00:18 | This is done every day. Millions of standard def DVDs are
sold a month. Perfectly good way to distribute your program,
| | 00:24 | but you lose all that extra high quality that HD provides.
| | 00:28 | If you wanted to sell your program to say
a broadcast outlet here in North America,
| | 00:33 | they can't even decide what format they will support
internally as ABC, Fox and ESPN support 720p;
| | 00:39 | CBS and NBC, PBS and many major cable channel support 1080i.
| | 00:45 | So before you start cutting a single shot you want to contact
your distributor and say, how do you want this to delivered?
| | 00:52 | And look at the excepted distribution media. They're
going to ask for your program on D5, which is tape,
| | 00:58 | HDCAM, which is tape, HDCAM SR, which is tape.
| | 01:02 | Notice that HDV is not on this list, nor is any tapeless format.
| | 01:08 | This points to one of the key things
that we're going to be learning about HD.
| | 01:12 | How you shoot the program and how you
distribute the program are totally disconnected.
| | 01:19 | The rule is figure out how you're going to distribute your show,
| | 01:22 | and back into it from the distribution format.
| | 01:26 | We'll be talking more about that when we talk
about HD workflow a little later in this title.
| | 01:30 | For now, notice what you need to do. You need to contact
your distributor first, edit your shows second and that way,
| | 01:38 | you know they're not working at cross purposes.
| | 01:41 | This has been a lot to cover.
| | 01:43 | Let's try and put a summary on
| | 01:45 | next.
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| Summary| 00:00 | Let me just state this right up front.
| | 00:03 | HD is a mess.
| | 00:05 | Not only is it a mess, what you don't know will cost you money.
| | 00:09 | It's not one of the situations where you can just pretend.
| | 00:12 | When you suddenly pretend and you're shooting the wrong
format and you can pull a chroma key, it's a whole lot more
| | 00:18 | expensive to go back and reshoot
| | 00:20 | than to spend a few minutes thinking about what you
want to do with the cameras which are about to buy.
| | 00:24 | Which means that planning ahead is critical to your success.
| | 00:28 | Keep in mind also that not all HD formats are the same.
There's a reason all these different formats exist so spend some
| | 00:34 | time learning the strengths and weaknesses of each so you can
make a good decision. And what they're going to do is they're
| | 00:46 | going to throw terms around like well, this is got this kind
of an image size, it's got this kind of compression.
| | 00:48 | you begin understand what the ranges are and how different
elements in different cameras in different formats can fit in.
| | 00:56 | There's a reason that some HD cameras are cheaper than others.
| | 01:00 | And that reason generally has to do with image quality,
| | 01:03 | It's got this kind of file storage requirements and now
| | 01:05 | and don't assume that every HD format
can be edited on your system.
| | 01:11 | It's a point of fact that some cameras are uneditable.
| | 01:15 | It's much better to know that before
you buy the camera than afterwards.
| | 01:19 | I wish I could stress this even more. I get so many e-mails
a day from people who are saying, "Larry, I just spent all
| | 01:26 | this money, and I can't use the camera." And I said
"Yeah, you bought a camera that doesn't work."
| | 01:31 | Avoid that problem.
| | 01:33 | Yes, it's hard work. Yes, it's a complete mess. Yes, it's way too
many things are gone wrong. Yes, there's way too much stuff to learn.
| | 01:40 | But if you spend some time and ask a few questions you'll
discover that there's some really obviously good choices for
| | 01:46 | the kind of work that you want to do.
| | 01:48 | And it's much better to spend an extra day just thinking
about it and asking questions and then rush out and buy the
| | 01:54 | latest toy and discover that doesn't work properly for your system,
for your needs, for your budget, under your deadlines.
| | 02:02 | There is not a perfect camera,
| | 02:04 | but there's a pretty darn good one that meets all of the
needs that you cannot need to spend the time to do some homework.
| | 02:10 | That should decrease my e-mail by about 150 messages a day.
| | 02:15 | So now with that as a background let's start shifting gears and
talk about how we're going to get this stuff acquired, look at some
| | 02:21 | acquisition formats and start talking about gear.
| | 02:24 | All of that is next.
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|
|
2. Acquisition FormatsChoosing an acquisition format| 00:00 | In this section I want help you select the right acquisition format.
| | 00:04 | An acquisition format is the video format you use to acquire
or shoot the image. Now there is no one best acquisition format
| | 00:12 | the same way there's no one best camera. There's
way too many different criteria that everybody's got.
| | 00:17 | So you want to make sure that you ask your questions
up front to decide what format you want to use.
| | 00:21 | For instance, how you plan to distribute your title?
| | 00:24 | If you're going to shoot HD and yet
downconvert it and release it to an SD DVD,
| | 00:27 | then you've got lots of different options you can choose from.
| | 00:30 | If you're going to shoot HD and release it for broadcast on
ABC, you have very limited options. And what formats are within
| | 00:37 | your budget? How important is budget given all
the other criteria we've been learning about?
| | 00:41 | And what formats are supported by your editing equipment? Not
just can your camera can be controlled by your editing equipment,
| | 00:47 | but does your hard disk support the data
rate generated by that video format?
| | 00:51 | Sometimes you may need to upgrade from
a single FireWire 400 drive to a RAID
| | 00:55 | to be able to make sure you can deliver the
speed necessary for the video format you've selected.
| | 01:00 | And what formats have the image quality that you
need? For instance, how important is compositing?
| | 01:05 | If you just doing bridal photography for instance, and it's
just beautiful images, then an 8-bit format would work great.
| | 01:11 | If you're doing heavy chroma key work, you're going to start
to have some real problems with a Long-GOB based compression
| | 01:16 | structure or even perhaps 8-bit video.
| | 01:19 | And what formats have the flexibility that you need?
For instance, interchangeable lenses or multiple camera formats
| | 01:25 | or storage media or portability? These are the kinds
of questions you want to ask yourself as you're deciding
| | 01:30 | what acquisition format you want to pick.
| | 01:33 | Now to help in this regard, I've put together a table
| | 01:35 | and I've picked the five low-end versions just to give you
something to compare. This is by no means every possible criteria,
| | 01:42 | but just something to spark your thinking. For instance,
if we take a look at image compression HDV and XDCAM HD
| | 01:48 | and AVC HD all use a Long-GOB based compression.
| | 01:52 | DVCPro HD and ProRes are I-frame based.
| | 01:55 | Every one of these five formats has a different way of storing
media. HDV uses tape. The low-end DVCPro HD cameras are on cards.
| | 02:02 | The high end are on tape.
| | 02:03 | XDCAM HD is on optical disc. AVC HD is on a card and
ProRes is a hard disk based format. Not all these formats are
| | 02:11 | accepted by distributors. HDV, XDCAM HD and AVC HD
are acquisition formats, but not distribution formats.
| | 02:18 | DVCPro HD is definitely for distribution and ProRes can be
depending upon where you're going. You need to check first.
| | 02:25 | Prices range and this is not surprising.
HDV and AVC HD are the lower-cost cameras.
| | 02:31 | DVCPro HD starts at $5-10,000 and goes up from there.
XDCAM HD is $20,000 or less. ProRes doesn't have a camera that
| | 02:39 | shoots it so that's not appropriate this time. Generally HDV does
not have interchangeable lenses though one Canon camera does.
| | 02:46 | XDCAM HD, interchangeable. AVC HD is designed
for the consumer market and doesn't.
| | 02:51 | DVCPro HD, the higher-end cameras, do have interchangeable
lenses. ProRes again, just a format. Bit depth. Everybody is
| | 02:58 | 8-bit except ProRes. ProRes gives higher image quality and
you can see that the Long-GOP based compression does require
| | 03:04 | conforming; DVCPro HD and ProRes do not. The reason AVC HD
does not requires is the only way we can work with AVC HD
| | 03:12 | inside Final Cut today is to automatically convert
it during capture out of AVC HD into ProRes.
| | 03:18 | So while AVC HD natively does require conforming,
| | 03:22 | Final Cut doesn't edit it that way. It needs to transfer
to ProRes and ProRes does not require conforming.
| | 03:27 | Just some things to think about as we're building our list
of how we want to work with files and what we want to work with
| | 03:33 | and to help you help your producers
pick the right gear to make your life
| | 03:37 | a lot easier. Let's talk next about hardware,
| | 03:40 | both hardware requirements inside Final Cut Studio and hardware
to make sure that Final Cut Studio works well with your
| | 03:46 | high-definition gear.
| | 03:47 | All of that
| | 03:48 | is next.
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|
|
3. Hardware RequirementsFinal Cut Studio requirements| 00:00 | In this section we'll talk about the hardware requirements
to be able to do HD and we'll start with Final Cut Studio.
| | 00:06 | If you're working in HD, Final Cut Studio 2 requires at least
a G5 quad or an Intel Mac. You need at least 2 GB of RAM,
| | 00:15 | but you don't really need more than 4. You need a 20 inch
monitor for 720p video or a 23 inch monitor or greater
| | 00:22 | for 1080i.
| | 00:24 | And you need at least two hard disks, one for the application,
generally your boot drive, and the other to store video data.
| | 00:30 | If you decide you want to work with AVC HD, this requires an
Intel Mac and OS 10.5 because were going to convert AVC HD
| | 00:38 | into ProRes and that requires some serious horsepower to do in real time.
| | 00:42 | Final Cut Pro 6 does not require a special graphics card
for HD, although Motion and Color do take advantage of the
| | 00:49 | graphics card. Finally as this changes on almost a daily
basis, make sure to visit Apple's website at apple.com for
| | 00:56 | updates to the system requirements,
but the requirements for Final Cut Studio
| | 01:01 | are the easy part because we check into that whenever we
decide to buy or upgrade the application. What gets trickier
| | 01:07 | is when we want to add the additional
hardware necessary to support HD and that
| | 01:11 | is what I want to talk about next.
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| Special hardware for HD| 00:00 | Final Cut has its own requirements of your computer if it's
going to edit HD, but your computer is only a part of the process.
| | 00:07 | High definition video also requires additional gear separate
and distinct from whatever you put into your computer
| | 00:12 | and this gear falls into three categories. The first are
faster and bigger hard drives. The second are capture cards
| | 00:18 | you can use to convert media to and from tapee. And
third are monitors that you need to use to view your high
| | 00:26 | definition images. Let's take a closer look at
each of these three categories and we'll start
| | 00:30 | with faster and thicker hard drives.
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| RAID arrays| 00:00 | Video consumes hard drives and nothing consumes hard drives like HD.
| | 00:05 | HD requires faster data rates which create far larger files
than standard def so unless you're working exclusively in HDV,
| | 00:14 | consider the benefits of buying a RAID. A RAID, which
stands for redundant array of inexpensive drives. Or discs.
| | 00:20 | There's a debate on that point. A RAID provides much faster data
transfer speeds and much greater storage along with data redundancy.
| | 00:28 | Data redundancy means that if one of
your hard drives fails, your data is safe,
| | 00:33 | but it provides it at a price. When buying a RAID, make
sure to get one from a vendor that has expertise in video.
| | 00:39 | Most RAIDs are sold for servers or for Photoshop, both of
which have entirely different requirements. Now it's not
| | 00:46 | appropriate, I think, in this training to list specific vendors
that are appropriate for RAIDs but you'll be able to tell
| | 00:51 | if they're focusing on the video market just by
looking at their website and reading their credentials.
| | 00:56 | Let me give an example of the different RAID types that are out there.
| | 01:00 | There's actually seven. There's RAID 0 through RAID 60.
| | 01:04 | RAID 0's are fast and cheap,
| | 01:06 | but they don't provide any data redundancy.
If one of the drives goes you've lost all your data.
| | 01:12 | And this is because your data is not stored on one drive
or another in a RAID. Pieces of your file are stored across
| | 01:19 | all the drives.
| | 01:20 | So you don't end up with the file on just drive one or a
file on drive two. The file is shared across all the drives.
| | 01:26 | RAID 0's require a minimum of two drives. It's relatively
inexpensive to put them together and they are quick.
| | 01:33 | And if your projects are relatively short-lived, RAID 0 is
a very cost-effective way to go. RAID 1 is not appropriate
| | 01:40 | for video. They're designed for servers, because what they do
is they take the two drives, or more, inside RAID 1 and then make
| | 01:47 | an exact copy of your data on all
of the two drives or three drives.
| | 01:51 | The purpose, especially in servers, is in case one of those
drives goes down there's a complete perfect copy of your data
| | 01:56 | on the other side.
| | 01:57 | The problem is you're not getting greater storage and you're
not getting greater speed. It's specifically designed to give
| | 02:03 | you protection in case of data loss. A RAID 3, which is most often
seen on the PC, gives you faster speeds and it gives you data redundancy.
| | 02:11 | It's just not as cheap as a RAID 0.
| | 02:13 | A RAID 5, which is the best RAID for the Macintosh,
requires a minimum of three drives and most of them are
| | 02:19 | between three and six. A RAID 5 is very fast with data
redundancy. If any one of those drives dies, the system can
| | 02:27 | automatically rebuilt your data
| | 02:29 | when you replace the bad drive with a good one.
| | 02:31 | It's just not as cheap as a RAID 0.
| | 02:33 | A RAID 6 is relatively new. It's also very fast,
but it gives you extra data redundancy because in a
| | 02:39 | RAID 6 you can lose two drives and still recover
your data and it's more expensive than a RAID 5.
| | 02:45 | When you're looking at data redundancy, RAID 5 versus
RAID 6, you have to ask yourself, how many times have I
| | 02:51 | experienced a drive failure and what's the risk to me if I do?
| | 02:54 | If I've got most of my project stored on one or two tapes
and my project lasts a week, for me a RAID 0 is fine
| | 03:01 | because if I have to recapture, I'm not going to be
investing that much time to recapture everything.
| | 03:06 | If on the other hand, I working on a feature film, and I've
got say a terabyte of storage, and it's been captured over
| | 03:11 | the course of 4 or 5 weeks, there redundancy is everything.
I can't afford to go through recapturing all that media again.
| | 03:18 | A RAID 5, a RAID 6 makes a lot of sense. The chances of
two drives failing at the same time in a unit is pretty low.
| | 03:25 | I'm not sure I'm completely convinced of the need for a RAID 6,
but if you're one of those people who worries about that sort of thing,
| | 03:31 | you can worry less with a RAID 6.
| | 03:33 | Now there's two combinations of a RAID 0 and a RAID 5 or
a RAID 6. It's called RAID 50 and RAID 60. RAID 50 was the
| | 03:40 | structure that Apple used in their Apple RAID. It's extremely
fast with a vast data storage and good data redundancy. However,
| | 03:48 | it's seriously expensive. It's noisy. You need to mount it in a rack.
A RAID 60 gives us all the same data protection of a RAID 6.
| | 03:55 | We can lose two drives on each side of this two-sided RAID
and we can see data transfer speeds pushing over
| | 04:02 | a gigabyte a second.
| | 04:03 | Massive.
| | 04:06 | I'm doing the math. Yep. Over a gigabyte a second.
Massive, massive amounts of data transfer.
| | 04:11 | Perfect for the extreme high end of HD camera or
HDCAM SR, but it's going dent your checkbook. It's noisy
| | 04:17 | and requires rack mounting.
| | 04:19 | Do your homework. Figure out what's most important to you.
Again, it's always a tossup, budget and data security and speed,
| | 04:25 | but you at least understand what the numbers
mean. But there's more hardware to talk about.
| | 04:29 | Those are capture cards.
| | 04:31 | We'll talk about that
| | 04:32 | next.
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| Capture cards| 00:00 | A capture card provides three functions in both standard
def and high def video. First, it converts your data during
| | 00:07 | input from a external data video source like a deck into
a format the computer can read. Second, it monitors your
| | 00:13 | images during editing and output and third, it converts
the data during output from its computer format into something
| | 00:20 | that can be stored on tape.
| | 00:21 | In other words, the capture card is involved at the beginning
of the process and at the end of the process and is used to
| | 00:27 | monitor during the process.
| | 00:29 | Well that's cool, if you're working with tape.
| | 00:32 | But if you're working with tapeless, such as a P2 card,
| | 00:35 | you may not need a capture card because you're going to
ingest, separate from a capture card. You'll just simply pull it.
| | 00:41 | It's like an importing. We'll show it to you a little later in this
training. And if you're going out to the web or you're going out to a
| | 00:46 | QuickTime file, the capture card becomes unnecessary.
| | 00:49 | But you still have to monitor your HD video accurately.
There's two reasons for this. Reason number one, your
| | 00:55 | computer monitor's not accurate and number two, right
now FireWire is not fast enough to support output of
| | 01:02 | high-definition video to be monitored.
| | 01:05 | We can output high def and down convert to standard def
and watch high def on a standard def monitor, but you shot
| | 01:11 | high def to be able to see higher resolution
and currently FireWire just doesn't support that.
| | 01:16 | Let's take a look of what the different video formats are
and see how everything sort of fits together. Remember we've
| | 01:21 | already been talking about hard disk needs and now we're
talking capture cards. So if we have a format like HDV,
| | 01:27 | HDV doesn't require a capture card because it comes in via FireWire
and it doesn't need a RAID because the data format is too small.
| | 01:34 | DVCPro HD does not require a capture card if you're
working with P2 cards, but if you're working with tape
| | 01:40 | probably a capture card would be a good idea.
| | 01:43 | Yes, some of the Panasonic decks have FireWire on them,
but I have seen some of that FireWire to be a bit problematic.
| | 01:49 | So you would probably want have a capture card in your back
pocket just to be safe. And although DVCPro HD can work on a
| | 01:56 | single drive, you'll have better performance if you do it on a RAID.
| | 01:59 | XDCAM HD comes in on a blue ray disc so it doesn't need a
capture card. Doesn't need a RAID because its relatively small.
| | 02:06 | XDCAM EX comes in on an SxS card.
| | 02:09 | Doesn't need a capture card and also relatively small
file sizes, doesn't need to RAID. Doesn't require it.
| | 02:15 | RAIDs will always benefit but are not required.
| | 02:18 | ProRes 422. If you're doing real-time conversion, that
has to have a capture card and RAIDs are recommended.
| | 02:23 | If you doing a batch convert, say you've already
captured as HDV and you want to convert to ProRes 422,
| | 02:28 | batch conversion happens at computer speeds.
| | 02:31 | Capture cards are not necessary.
| | 02:32 | ProRes 422 High Quality, however, is a much bigger
codec and that real-time requires a capture card,
| | 02:39 | and it requires a RAID.
| | 02:41 | HDCAM requires a capture card and requires a RAID
and HDCAM SR requires a capture card and requires a RAID.
| | 02:48 | Now here's the trick.
| | 02:49 | Let's say that you shooting HDV, but you want to output to
HDCAM. The only way you can do that is to have a capture card.
| | 02:56 | Not for ingest because that comes in via FireWire, but for output.
| | 02:59 | Remember a capture card's needed at two different points in
the process: where you bring stuff in and how you get stuff out.
| | 03:06 | Now there's lots of options for capture cards, but
there's three companies I want to call to your attention.
| | 03:10 | One is AJA and they have devices which are attached your
computer via FireWire and PCI cards. The top box is the
| | 03:19 | AJA I/O HD. Black Magic Design is another company. They make the
Deck Link Extreme. This happens to be a Deck Link Extreme HD card.
| | 03:28 | They attach into your Mac Pro or they attach into your G5
as a PCI card. Canopus is another company, sort of second-tier.
| | 03:35 | AJA and Black Magic I would consider top-tier.
Canopus: excellent but not necessarily broadcast quality
| | 03:41 | and they are attached via FireWire.
| | 03:44 | These are companies that you can check into
and see which device best meets your needs.
| | 03:48 | Remember it's monitoring, it's input and it's output. So
we've talked about hard drives, we've talked about capture cards,
| | 03:54 | but we haven't talked about monitoring and why
monitoring is important. Let's tackle that next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Monitoring| 00:00 | Monitoring is the process of watching your high-definition
video on a device that allows you to see accurate color, accurate
| | 00:08 | grayscale, accurate interlacing and full raster,
that is to say to see every pixel that's there.
| | 00:14 | All without distortion.
| | 00:16 | And here's the key point, you can not use your computer monitor
| | 00:19 | to make it accurate color decisions. Yes, you see the image
on your computer, but that image of your video that you see
| | 00:25 | on your computer does not show
it in the correct color space,
| | 00:29 | doesn't show it with correct white level,
| | 00:30 | doesn't show it with the correct midtone gray
level. Probably crushes the blacks just a bit.
| | 00:35 | Doesn't show interlacing and it doesn't show it with color
sampling. In other words, yes, it's sort of an approximation
| | 00:40 | of a sort of thing that's like kind of the image,
but it isn't accurate. For that, you need to monitor.
| | 00:47 | Now monitoring is actually a two-step process.
First, we have to get the signal out of the computer and
| | 00:51 | then second we have to have a device to show that signal on.
| | 00:54 | Now getting the signal out of the computer, we can use our
capture card or if we don't need a capture card except for
| | 01:00 | monitoring, you could use a device that's
specifically designed for monitoring
| | 01:04 | such as the Matrox MXO,
| | 01:06 | which is illustrated here.
| | 01:07 | HD monitors are not cheap,
| | 01:10 | but if color accuracy is important to you or your clients,
they're vital. Imagine how much time and effort and money
| | 01:17 | McDonald's has spent to make sure that Golden Arch is exactly
the right color of gold or the red swash is exactly the right
| | 01:23 | color red for Coke. If you were doing work for McDonald's or
you were doing work for Coke and you didn't exactly match that
| | 01:30 | yellow or didn't exactly match the red, I don't think they
would take it lightly. That's why you need to have monitors,
| | 01:35 | to guarantee that the color that you're working
with is the color that ends up being transmitted.
| | 01:40 | Well let's take a look at what our choices are here.
| | 01:42 | Here's just three sample ways of doing monitors. There's a
lot of other choices, but I picked three. The first is the
| | 01:47 | Matrox MX0 combined with the Apple Cinema desktop monitor.
What the MXO does is it converts a digital signal into a
| | 01:55 | form that the monitor will show the correct color
space and color sampling and grayscale and black.
| | 02:01 | In other words, it does a really sweet job of
converting a computer monitor into a video monitor.
| | 02:06 | And these two, the Apple Cinema desktop monitor
and the Matrox MX0, combined is about $1800.
| | 02:13 | A midpriced is the JVC D24-L1DU. This takes an HD SDI signal
and it gives us a really nice looks, but it's about $3500.
| | 02:23 | Another flat panel is the Sony LMD2450WHD. Also takes HD SDI signals
coming off your capture card and gives us very pretty pictures.
| | 02:32 | There's even high end CRTs. The highest quality of
HD monitoring is a CRT-based monitor and those are pushing
| | 02:39 | $20-$24,000 to be able to get that kind of accuracy.
| | 02:43 | My basic feeling is if you're not going to projection,
if your image is not to get blown up to 180 foot screen,
| | 02:50 | a flat panel monitor will be fine.
| | 02:52 | If you're going to be blowing it up or you really need absolute
critical color correction, or it's going to go out to
| | 02:57 | any kind of mass distribution where it's seen on a
big-screen, then a CRT-based monitor is going to give you
| | 03:02 | the accuracy that you need. Again, there's not one
perfect choice, but here's three you can consider.
| | 03:08 | So getting our gear ready is more than just making sure we
got enough RAM in the computer and we've upgraded Final Cut.
| | 03:14 | We also have to take a look at what kind of hard disks we have
attached to our system, how we're going to get the information in
| | 03:19 | and out and how we're going to monitor it.
| | 03:22 | But there's still more to cover.
| | 03:23 | And that is the HD workflow.
| | 03:26 | We'll talk about that
| | 03:27 | next.
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| Summary| 00:00 | As we've gone through this section, keep in mind
that the video format you shoot will almost never be
| | 00:05 | the video format you distribute.
| | 00:08 | Therefore, configuring your computer is only a part of the
process. You also need to determine whether your video format
| | 00:14 | requires a capture card, where you'll
store your media and how you'll monitor it.
| | 00:18 | Keep in mind also that the key to performance
on your system are your hard disks.
| | 00:22 | They are much more important than the amount of RAM
you have installed or the speed of your processor,
| | 00:27 | but that now we've got the gear figured out
| | 00:30 | and we've got our basic terminology defined,
there's still one more thing we need to cover
| | 00:34 | before we jump into Final Cut itself,
| | 00:37 | and that's to talk about the workflow.
| | 00:39 | Because the way that we work with standard def video and
the way we work with high def video are two different things.
| | 00:46 | And we'll talk about that
| | 00:48 | next.
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|
|
4. WorkflowsOverview| 00:00 | In this section, I want to talk about HD workflows.
Specifically I want to distinguish between what the HD workflow is
| | 00:06 | and the standard def workflow. Then we'll take a look at a
workflow for transcoding and finally I want to wrap up with
| | 00:12 | some thoughts on achieving a film look, which is
getting all kinds of buzz right now on the web,
| | 00:17 | and I want to weigh in with my own opinions.
| | 00:19 | Let's start though with taking a look at the
differences between a standard and a high def workflow
| | 00:25 | That is next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| HD workflow| 00:00 | When we take a look at the differences between standard def
and high def in terms of workflows, here's the basic idea.
| | 00:06 | In standard def,
| | 00:08 | when you choose your camera, that determines your workflow.
| | 00:11 | I'm going to shoot DV. I then capture DV, I edit DV, I output DV.
| | 00:16 | I'm going to shoot digi-beta. I capture digi-beta, I edit
digi-beta, I output digi-beta. The choice of your camera
| | 00:22 | determines your workflow.
| | 00:23 | In HD you work backwards.
Your output format determines the workflow.
| | 00:29 | No one ships an HDV tape anywhere. No one ships an XDCAM
HD blue ray disc anywhere. You're going to acquire in one
| | 00:37 | media, but you're going to edit and distribute
in something totally different. In other words,
| | 00:41 | you work backwards. Let me illustrate.
| | 00:45 | This is a standard definition workflow. We grab our camera,
we decide what camera we're going to use. That determines the
| | 00:50 | format we're going to edit and that determines the format
that we're going to output. It's a very simple flow from
| | 00:56 | beginning to end. But in HD we start at the end. You remember
earlier we talked about the fact there's lots of different
| | 01:01 | distribution formats, and there's lots of acquisition formats
and the two of them just don't match? So here with an HD
| | 01:08 | workflow, we pick the format that we're going to release. Are we
doing standard def DVD? Are we doing HDCAM? Are we doing D5?
| | 01:15 | Are we doing high def DVD? I mean, what's our output?
That determines the kind of format we're going to use to edit
| | 01:22 | and that then means that we can acquire
in any format, convert on capture
| | 01:28 | and edit in that transcoded format.
| | 01:31 | Well there's an interesting word, transcode.
| | 01:34 | What is transcoding and how do we do it?
| | 01:37 | We'll talk about that
| | 01:38 | next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Transcoding workflow| 00:00 | Transcoding is the process of converting video from
one format, say HDV, to another format, say ProRes 422.
| | 00:09 | Now there's three ways you can transcode.
| | 00:12 | You can transcode, that is to say convert, during capture.
For example you could convert HDCAM SR into ProRes.
| | 00:19 | Or you could transcode after capture, but before you start
editing. For example, you want to convert HDV into ProRes.
| | 00:27 | Or you could transcode the final edited
project after output, but before distribution.
| | 00:33 | For example, you want to edit in DVCPro HD then convert this
to standard def for distribution onto standard def DVD.
| | 00:41 | So to help confuse things even further, I put together a table
| | 00:45 | and this table gives us the benefits and the limitations
of all these different types of transcoding. For instance,
| | 00:50 | if we transcode during capture the benefit is that it happens
in real time, either because we're transcoding HDV to ProRes
| | 00:56 | on a very fast machine or we're using a capture card. Transcoding
during capture makes it easy to combine different video formats
| | 01:03 | during the edit because we convert them all to a single format
and it means that we're working at final quality during our edit
| | 01:10 | process so we can see the quality of our final images.
| | 01:13 | The limitations, however, to transcoding during
capture is that in general you need a capture card.
| | 01:18 | Not specifically for HDV, but for any other format.
| | 01:22 | Transcoding doesn't improve image quality;
it just changes the format of the information.
| | 01:28 | And you need to convert all of your footage, whether you're
going to use it or not, because you don't know yet what footage
| | 01:33 | you're going to need, which means you'll be spending a lot of time
transcoding footage that never actually ends up in your project.
| | 01:40 | Well we could transcode after capture, but before we begin
editing. The benefit to this is it doesn't require a capture card.
| | 01:46 | It still allows us to easily combine different formats and
again we can work at final quality, but because we are using
| | 01:52 | a computer it means that we're slower than real time.
| | 01:56 | And we still need to convert all of our
footage and it doesn't improve image quality.
| | 02:01 | Let me digress on this image quality if you will for second.
| | 02:04 | Imagine yourself standing next to a bubbling mountain brook
| | 02:08 | and you have a 5 gallon wooden bucket in your hand. You dip
that 5 gallon wooden bucket into the bubbling mountain brook and
| | 02:14 | it's now filled with what used to be bubbling mountain brook water.
| | 02:18 | Now in your other hand, you're holding
a 1 cup plastic measuring cup.
| | 02:22 | You dip the 1 cup plastic measuring cup into
that 5 gallon bucket and pull out one cup of water
| | 02:28 | and then in the 5 gallon bucket, you throw the rest of it away.
| | 02:32 | Now you have compressed
| | 02:35 | that bubbling mountain brook into a single cup of water.
| | 02:38 | To restore it back to its native state, you could then pour
that 1 cup of water back into the 5 gallon wooden bucket.
| | 02:45 | It now has the form of uncompressed.
It's the form of the 5 gallon bucket.
| | 02:50 | But it has the contents, the quality, of just that 1 cup of water.
| | 02:55 | So what we've done is we've converted that
compressed footage back into an uncompressed state.
| | 03:00 | But we haven't put back in all the quality that was thrown away.
| | 03:04 | That's the problem we have with transcoding.
We can change its form.
| | 03:08 | But we can't improve the quality.
| | 03:11 | Now there's one more place we can transcode and that's
transcoding after output, but before distribution. This allows us
| | 03:17 | to edit our video at native quality and we only have to
convert the finished project, which means we're converting
| | 03:23 | much, much less information.
| | 03:24 | The limitation of this is that what you see
during editing is not your final quality.
| | 03:30 | Now for you, some of these limitations may not be a big deal
and some of these benefits may not be a big deal. You get to
| | 03:35 | sort of weigh which one works the best for you,
but I wanted to share these three ways of transcoding
| | 03:40 | so you can think about that as we start to work with
our high def footage a little bit later in this training.
| | 03:46 | Now there's one more thing I want to dwell on for just
a moment and that's the whole brouhaha we're going through,
| | 03:51 | talking about what is a film look
| | 03:54 | and how we achieve it.
| | 03:56 | So I'm going to throw my oar in that water too. We'll
talk about achieving a film look in your high def video.
| | 04:01 | Next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Achieving a "film look"| 00:00 | There's a lot of debate going on now about
how to achieve a film look to our video.
| | 00:05 | While ignoring the obvious answer, which is if you want a
film look, shoot film- which is clearly the cynical approach-
| | 00:11 | my opinion is that unless you're outputting to film,
there's no reason to shoot 24 frames a second.
| | 00:17 | In some cameras 24 frames a second can give us a jerky playback.
If you're interested in smooth playback, higher frame rates
| | 00:24 | will make a vast difference in smoothing out motion on screen.
| | 00:28 | Many people view 24 frames a second as sort of a panacea
to say, well film shoots 24, video should shoot 24
| | 00:35 | to give us the same look.
| | 00:37 | Well, I disagree. So I'd like you to think about something
a little bit different. Here are five things that you can do
| | 00:43 | that will make your video images look film like.
| | 00:46 | And none of them require shooting 24 frames.
| | 00:49 | Also keep in mind, he said just digressing for a moment,
that we never actually see 24 frames if we're watching it on
| | 00:55 | television or watching on cable or watching on TV or watching
on DVD. All of those are either 25 frames if we're watching PAL
| | 01:02 | or 30 frames if we're watching in an NTSC country. Never
do we see 24, unless we're watching actual projected film
| | 01:10 | or we're watching on a computer screen.
| | 01:13 | So back to these five things. The first is don't overexpose your
whites. Overexposed whites are a dead giveaway for bad video.
| | 01:21 | Second, concentrate on getting good shadow detail. Don't
have your shadows be so dark you can't see what's inside them.
| | 01:27 | Next significantly decrease your depth of field.
| | 01:31 | One of the key giveaways of cheap cameras
is you've got focus that goes forever.
| | 01:36 | But when you look at a film the depth of field, the area
that's in focus, is always very narrow, which means the
| | 01:43 | background and the foreground blur out, concentrating
just your eye on the subject that you want people to see.
| | 01:50 | Consider shooting a progressive frame rather than interlaced.
I tend to think progressive has a much more filmic look
| | 01:56 | than an interlaced screen. And if you've ever talked to
a Director of Photography that's done a lot of film,
| | 02:02 | not one of them will tell you that they ever shoot film without
putting some sort of filter in front of the camera to improve the look.
| | 02:09 | Well steal their ideas. Consider using camera filters.
For instance, if you're shooting interviews or talking heads,
| | 02:15 | put a one quarter warm black promist in front of your lense
and discover what that does to skin tones and softening lines
| | 02:23 | and it does miraculous things, which are really hard to
do in post and very, very easy to do as part of the shooting.
| | 02:31 | Consider that the film look starts with your lighting.
| | 02:36 | It doesn't start with what you do inside postproduction.
| | 02:40 | Just something to think about.
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|
|
5. Getting HD into FCPOverview| 00:00 | Man, I tell you it seemed like we were never going to get here,
but finally we're going to start running some software.
| | 00:07 | After all of our time spent getting ready
and understanding how this stuff works.
| | 00:12 | Let's show you how Final Cut handles HD. We're going to break this
into a variety of sections. First we'll cover HDV in terms of capturing
| | 00:19 | both natively and converting into ProRes, DVCPro HD in
terms of system setup and ingesting then we'll talk about
| | 00:26 | AVCHD and AVC-Intra, two new formats that are starting to show up.
I'll show you how to capture XDCAM HD and EX, uncompressed HD
| | 00:35 | and we'll wrap up with a discussion on HD image sequences.
| | 00:39 | We're going to start though with
one of the more popular formats, HDV.
| | 00:43 | That's next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Capturing native HDV| 00:00 | Well I know you never thought this time would come,
| | 00:02 | but we're actually running software at this point.
| | 00:05 | I've started Final Cut 6.0.2. The reason the .2 is important
is Apple made a lot of changes between 6.0.1 and 6.0.2.
| | 00:14 | And 6.0.2 supports features in HD that the earlier versions
do not. So we're going to work with 6.0.2 at this point,
| | 00:21 | and the first thing we want to do is to make sure we
get this configured to work with HDV. I've trashed all the
| | 00:27 | preferences so all the preference settings are set
back to their default. So we'll go back to Easy Setup.
| | 00:32 | When I click on Easy Setup it opens up the Easy Setup dialog box.
| | 00:36 | New with Final Cut 6 are these presets up here. These simply limit
the number of selections that we see in this bottom window.
| | 00:44 | It's actually this bottom pop-up that we care about, but
just to decrease what we're looking at let's set this to HDV.
| | 00:51 | We'll leave the Rate to all rates as we're only going to select one
and these all the different HDV flavors that Final Cut supports.
| | 00:58 | We were out recently to the beach in sunny southern California
and shooting some HDV footage and we wrote down in our checklist
| | 01:05 | that we were shooting 1080i 60 so we're going
to select that particular format and click Setup.
| | 01:11 | Notice that when we do, absolutely nothing changes.
| | 01:14 | And that's because changing the preferences do not affect
any already created sequences or already created projects.
| | 01:21 | It only changes that which is not yet been created. So I'm
going to delete this sequence by highlighting and hitting
| | 01:26 | the Delete key and go up and create a new sequence.
File, New, Sequence and now when I do,
| | 01:33 | notice it's automatically set to a 16x9 HDV sequence.
| | 01:38 | The Easy Setup tells Final Cut what kind
of video we're going to be expecting,
| | 01:43 | but I want to also go to the most important setup
screen inside Final Cut and talk about System Settings.
| | 01:48 | System Settings make sure that the rest of our system is working
properly. Notice that I'm always recording to my second drive
| | 01:54 | inside the Final Cut Pro Documents folder. Never, ever, ever
capture HD material to your internal hard drive. You're almost
| | 02:02 | always going to have problems because your internal hard
drive just isn't fast enough to support the operating system
| | 02:07 | and Final Cut and video capture and playback at the same time.
| | 02:12 | Another number that would be useful is to change this
Minimum Allowable Free Space. My recommendation is set that
| | 02:17 | to 10,000 and that way you got plenty of room on your
scratch disks to make sure that nothing gets too full.
| | 02:23 | This means that it's always going to keep at least 10 GB free.
I've got 144 free, so I'm not likely to exceed that.
| | 02:31 | The rest of these settings are fine as it is.
| | 02:33 | There's no special setting inside User Preferences that we
need to worry about for HDV, at least not at this point,
| | 02:40 | except for Render Control. We'll talk about that in the section
on editing and rendering a little later in this training.
| | 02:47 | Now that we've got Final Cut set, we've got our scratch disk
pointing to a second drive, we have turned our Easy Setup's
| | 02:53 | to HDV and looked at our checklist
to set the format of HDV that we shot.
| | 02:58 | Now let's open up File, Log and Capture.
| | 03:03 | The problem is if you're used to Log and Capture
in standard def, this has a different look.
| | 03:08 | And the different look
| | 03:10 | is because this is a screen that specifically
designed for the capture of HDV.
| | 03:16 | Now we as I said were out to the seashore- and let's just
rewind this by grabbing the Jog Shuttle and go backwards a bit
| | 03:23 | and rewind the tape.
| | 03:26 | And the incredibly professional slate that we're using
| | 03:32 | and here we have what could best be described as a shorebird.
| | 03:36 | I am a biologist by training, and that looks to me like a bird
if you ask me. And so therefore this is our shoal shorebird.
| | 03:44 | There we go. We've got a- oh, I digress. We'll set an in,
we'll hit the spacebar and notice that as soon as
| | 03:49 | we hit the in, the time code shows up here
| | 03:52 | and I'll set another in on the close-up.
| | 03:55 | The bird goes wading.
| | 03:57 | This is very much like a Gidget movie except...
| | 04:02 | without Gidget.
| | 04:04 | [Laughs] I amuse myself. Anyway, we've set an in, we've set an out.
Now the first thing we do over here once I get the video to stop
| | 04:13 | playing is I'll give this a tape number and call this HD003
because you want to assign every reel that you shoot
| | 04:22 | a unique ID so if you ever have to back and
recapture, you can. The problem is on some systems
| | 04:28 | recapturing HDV has been known to be problematic.
| | 04:32 | And that's due to the compression structure. Remember we talked
about the fact that HDV uses Long-GOP compression. Long-GOP
| | 04:38 | compression means that there's only one I-frame every 15
frames and that's the only frame we can put timecode on,
| | 04:44 | that's the only frame that is a self-contained
image. And sometimes when you try to recapture,
| | 04:50 | it doesn't lock to timecode accurately enough to do
recapture. So you make sure when you're working with HDV that
| | 04:55 | you don't plan on recapturing. Just to be safe.
| | 04:59 | We'll give this a name. Shoal Shore Bird.
| | 05:04 | And then, this is like a Log and Capture window for SD
and we're not going to do a scene. We'll uncheck this and only
| | 05:11 | those boxes which are checked to show up in the Name column.
| | 05:15 | Now that I've got an inset, the same way as we would normally,
typing the letter I. We set an out same way as normally. We type
| | 05:22 | the letter O. We're going to be recapturing a 10 second and
20 frame shot and we'll capture the clip by Capturing Clip.
| | 05:30 | Because the Prompt box is checked here,
| | 05:33 | it pops-up this dialog.
| | 05:35 | If Prompt is not checked, then that dialog box does not show
up and we'll just click OK and it goes off to capture our video.
| | 05:42 | Rewinds the deck now. If you are lucky enough to be staring
at your HDV camera or a deck while capturing is going on,
| | 05:49 | don't panic.
| | 05:51 | Because the picture that you see on the monitor of your
camera could be as much as 2 1/2 seconds different from
| | 05:57 | the picture that you see on the computer screen.
| | 06:00 | This is normal and it's due to the compression structure
and the delays inherent in transferring the data from
| | 06:06 | the camera to Final Cut. So you want
to make sure that you don't let that
| | 06:11 | get you surprised. Now let's just fast forward here.
| | 06:14 | And we're going to find the standard shot.
| | 06:17 | Notice that we're shooting 1080i 60. We know that
because that's what the Slate says. And I'm going to type
| | 06:23 | the letter I to set an in here, set an in. And this
time I'm going to set a duration of 20 seconds.
| | 06:29 | So I'll type in the top left box, it automatically sets my out.
| | 06:34 | And this gives me a chance if I say that I just want to
capture a certain duration, set the in, set the duration,
| | 06:40 | that automatically sets the out. Now in
this case we'll call it HDV 1080i/60 waves.
| | 06:48 | And the reason is we took two different cameras
out to the same location on this incredibly gray,
| | 06:53 | overcast day to shoot pictures of waves slamming across
rocks. So we've got HDV 1080i/60, we're shooting waves.
| | 07:01 | We're going to capture the clip.
| | 07:04 | It confirms the name. Click OK.
| | 07:06 | And it goes through the whole capture process again.
It's rewinding the tape and queuing stuff up
| | 07:13 | and get that handsome guy out of there.
| | 07:18 | And we'll go through and capture.
| | 07:20 | Notice as soon as we capture, the clip shows up over here
in the browser so we can see exactly what we're doing.
| | 07:26 | And this is how we capture our clips. We go through. It's exactly
the same processes using a Log and Capture for standard def.
| | 07:34 | It's just a different interface for the Log and Capture window.
| | 07:42 | Now one more thing I want talk about,
which is going over to Clip Settings.
| | 07:47 | When you go to Clip Settings,
| | 07:49 | this is where we can capture video only or audio only.
| | 07:53 | When we capture video only, we just uncheck Audio. That means
that will capture video with no audio. Or if I turn on Audio,
| | 07:59 | turn off Video, it'll capture audio with no video.
| | 08:02 | There's an important point here. In order for Final Cut to
capture, it must see a video signal. It that uses that video
| | 08:09 | signal for timing purposes. So if you're planning on
capturing audio only as long as you're attached via FireWire,
| | 08:16 | it won't be a problem. But if you're capturing with a capture
card, you need to feed it either black burst or timecode
| | 08:23 | or some other video signal to make
sure that it's got the timing circuit.
| | 08:26 | Otherwise your audio is just not going to capture properly at all.
| | 08:29 | If both these green lights are lit,
just as DV supports two tracks of audio,
| | 08:34 | HDV has two tracks of audio. When there's no linkage between
these two clips, we'll be capturing Dual Channel Mono.
| | 08:42 | That means that both tracks are panned center, and there's
no relationship between the audio level on track one
| | 08:49 | and the audio level on track two.
| | 08:51 | When you click this box right here, this cassette,
| | 08:54 | notice that there's now a link around these two tracks.
Now I'm capturing Stereo. The odd numbered track
| | 09:01 | is panned left, the even number track is panned right
and the audio levels are linked. If you bring the level
| | 09:07 | up on one track, the audio level on the other track goes
up or down by the same amount. If you want a link between,
| | 09:14 | you need to click this cassette, this linking. If you
don't want to link, like you're doing interviews,
| | 09:19 | then you make sure that there's no link. Generally only music
and stuff where you care about the left and right aspect to
| | 09:26 | the sound should be captured Stereo. Any kind of
a talking head should be captured Dual Channel Mono
| | 09:32 | with no link.
| | 09:33 | Also under Capture Settings, this allows you to change
your scratch disk if that becomes important to you.
| | 09:39 | So changing the scratch disk is in Capture Settings. Clip Settings
allows you to capture audio, video and change the audio setting
| | 09:46 | from Stereo to Dual Channel Mono.
| | 09:48 | By the way, by default,
| | 09:50 | Final Cut will create new clips whenever
it senses the Record button being pushed.
| | 09:55 | You can turn this off. I'm not exactly sure if it works inside
6.0.2, but in earlier versions of 6 it has not worked.
| | 10:01 | So I just let everything be a new clip. Just makes my life a
whole lot easier, because now I'm able to manage my media on
| | 10:08 | a clip by clip basis and just makes things a lot easier. If we
go to Logging, that's the same as it is inside standard def.
| | 10:15 | And that is how we setup for and capture HDV.
| | 10:19 | One more note and we'll stop and that is
when you're ready to watch your video,
| | 10:24 | be sure the Log and Capture window is closed
because when the Log and Capture window is open,
| | 10:29 | we sometimes have problems with playback.
| | 10:32 | As long as we're here, I'll show you this one other quick secret.
| | 10:35 | We go up to the View menu
| | 10:36 | and go down to Video Playback
| | 10:39 | and set that to Digital Cinema Desktop Preview,
| | 10:42 | your screen goes black.
| | 10:44 | Not to panic,
| | 10:45 | the world has not ended. What it's just
done is it turns your entire screen
| | 10:52 | into a full-screen video playback of your high def video.
| | 10:56 | Very cool. To get out, press the Escape key.
| | 11:00 | Once it's setup, to get in Command+F12. Command+F12 to get in,
| | 11:05 | Escape to get out.
| | 11:06 | That's HDV.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Capturing HDV to ProRes | 00:00 | Before we leave our subject of HDV, there is one new
feature that showed up with Final Cut 6.0.2 and that's
| | 00:06 | the ability to, using FireWire and assuming
you have a fast enough computer,
| | 00:10 | you can take HDV and transcode it directly into ProRes.
| | 00:15 | The advantage is not that your HDV is going to be any higher
quality. The quality is what it is recorded on the tape, but
| | 00:22 | all of your compositing, all of your effects, all of
your video processing and everything that you add to it
| | 00:28 | will be working with a higher quality video format.
| | 00:30 | If all you're doing is shooting HDV natively and using the images
you don't need to worry about this, but again, if you're
| | 00:36 | working your files into compositing, converting it to ProRes
| | 00:40 | is going to make a lot of difference in the quality of your
images, ultimately, by the time you're done and in decreasing
| | 00:46 | render time and speeding up the output because there's no conforming.
| | 00:50 | Here's how it works. We go up to Final Cut Pro, go down to Easy Setup.
| | 00:55 | We change the format. We're going to change it to Apple ProRes 422.
| | 01:01 | Notice it automatically knows that it's talking to HDV.
| | 01:05 | So when I click Setup,
| | 01:07 | something totally different happens when I go to capture that
clip. When I go File, Log and Capture, the Log and Capture
| | 01:14 | window does not open. Instead a small dialog
box opens up and I want to call this bird.
| | 01:21 | Because it's our little shore bird walking around
here. Watch what happens when I click Capture.
| | 01:26 | I've got no ability to set an in, no ability to set an out.
It just starts capturing by playing the tape.
| | 01:34 | It's capturing and instantly converting into ProRes and we
can see over here that the machine that we're running on
| | 01:40 | is fast enough to capture in real time.
| | 01:42 | Sometimes it'll run a little bit slower and it'll say capture's
running 1% or 2% or 5% slower than real time. That means
| | 01:50 | it's doing the data transfer to your computer and as fast as
the processor can process to convert it to ProRes, it does.
| | 01:57 | Notice that I've had three shots go by
so far, a wide shot, a tight shot with
| | 02:02 | the bird walking sideways and then this close up we've got here.
| | 02:06 | I'll point out why in just a second. So far we've been capturing
all as single stream and nothing shows up inside the browser.
| | 02:14 | I'm going to hit the Escape key.
| | 02:17 | And now we hit the Escape key, look at what's happened.
| | 02:21 | It is automatically captured our three shots
as stand-alone shots. There's our wide shot,
| | 02:28 | there's our close up walking sideways
| | 02:31 | and there is our close-up looking at the water.
| | 02:37 | If I select this clip we'll just take this one,
go Edit, Item Properties, Format.
| | 02:42 | Notice that it's Apple ProRes 422.
| | 02:46 | It's automatically converted to a 29.97,
because remember we shot 1080i 60 for HDV use.
| | 02:52 | That converts down to this
| | 02:54 | and it is now made it a ProRes clip,
| | 02:57 | traveling at 15.2 MB a second. There's two flavors of
ProRes, ProRes and ProRes HQ. If you're starting with
| | 03:05 | HDV there's no reason to work with ProRes HQ. It's going to
be just a much bigger file format with no real benefit to you.
| | 03:12 | So HDV, leave it at ProRes 422.
| | 03:16 | Queue your tape up at the beginning of what you
want to capture. Once you're tape is queued up
| | 03:21 | the process of capturing is as easy as going to File, Log and
Capture, give it a name and then it'll start capturing the clips
| | 03:28 | until you hit the Escape key and tell it to stop.
| | 03:30 | Now we're editing in ProRes,
| | 03:33 | as oppose to HDV.
| | 03:35 | This is a very fast way to transcode out of one format into
another to take advantage of the speed and the quality
| | 03:41 | that ProRes provides while still working with
small HDV cameras which are not that expensive.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Capturing DVCPRO HD| 00:00 | DVCPro HD actually exists in a couple of different flavors.
There's a tape version, which you would capture using a
| | 00:06 | capture card, but there's also the solid-
state version, which is captured to a P2 card.
| | 00:10 | I want to focus on capturing to the P2 card.
| | 00:13 | First, you shoot as you normally would on a camera
except your images, instead of being recorded to tape,
| | 00:18 | get recorded on this P2 card.
| | 00:20 | Then you mount the card on the desktop.
| | 00:22 | And in this case, you can see here that I've done that
and it's been given the No Name icon for a hard disk.
| | 00:28 | Before I do anything with this card,
I'd create a new folder on the hard disk.
| | 00:33 | And this folder name will become the real ID that Final Cut
uses. So in my particular case I would give it a two letter
| | 00:40 | code for the job and a two number code indicating say,
the number of the tapes that I shot for the job or the job number
| | 00:46 | or whatever. HD 05 for instance.
| | 00:49 | Then copy the entire contents of the P2 card into that folder.
Now when you open up the P2 card there's the lastclip.txt and
| | 00:59 | a locked folder called contents. You select both of those and
copy both of them into that new folder that you just created.
| | 01:06 | When you've done that you can then erase
the card and send it back into production.
| | 01:11 | In fact, the new P2 software that Panasonic has provided allows
us to easily reformat the card with just a mouse click and
| | 01:18 | get it back out to the camera.
| | 01:19 | The key is to make sure that once you've
copied this folder to your hard disk, just to
| | 01:24 | protect your peace of mind, make a duplicate copy of that
folder, because that's your master data and as soon as you
| | 01:30 | erase that card, all of that material exists now only
on your hard disk. Making copies is always a good idea.
| | 01:36 | But once you've made the copies and created a folder and
copied all the data etc., etc., how do we get into Final Cut?
| | 01:42 | You remember earlier in this training I was talking about
the importance of building an checklist to keep track of what
| | 01:48 | format you are shooting and what frame rate?
| | 01:51 | Well, that's especially true with the
Panasonic camera because it shoots so many.
| | 01:55 | The Panasonic P2 camera shoots 1080i, 1080 PSF
| | 02:00 | 720p 60,
| | 02:01 | 720p 30, 720p 24
| | 02:05 | and 720p N, or native format.
| | 02:09 | The interesting thing is that every one of those formats
except 720p N is actually recorded at 60 frames a second.
| | 02:17 | And it's inserting pulldown frames. This means that when we
capture we have to make sure to remove those pulldown frames.
| | 02:24 | Well, fortunately, because of the way the Panasonic records them,
removing pulldown frames is easy, provided you know where to look.
| | 02:31 | So let's get ourselves set up. We took our P2 camera
down to the Ventura beach on a cold and blustery winter
| | 02:37 | morning in Southern California, and we recorded some
| | 02:41 | footage at different frame rates and different frame sizes.
| | 02:44 | In this case we'll go up to Final Cut Pro.
| | 02:47 | Go down to Easy Setup.
| | 02:50 | These top two boxes are simply designed to minimize the number
of choices that show up when we look at this whole table here.
| | 02:57 | So I'll set this for HD
| | 03:00 | and then just those which are HD formats show up. And within
the HD formats, I've got about eight different DVC Pro HD formats.
| | 03:08 | 1080i 50, which is a PAL format,
and 60, which is NTSC, and 30 etc., etc.
| | 03:14 | Well in this particular case, I happen
to have shot 1080i 60 so I'll select that.
| | 03:19 | These top two boxes don't even have to be set at all. They're
simply helping to minimize the number of choices down here.
| | 03:26 | This bottom one's the only one that counts.
| | 03:29 | So we'll click on Setup
| | 03:30 | and we'll click Continue, saying we don't have to worry
about connecting to a camera. There's nothing for it to look for.
| | 03:36 | But notice that nothing has changed inside Final Cut.
| | 03:39 | And this is an important point because when you change your
preferences, none of your assisting sequences, existing clips
| | 03:46 | or edits or projects, not things that
has already been created is affected.
| | 03:51 | Preferences only affect that which has not yet been created.
| | 03:55 | So I'm going to get rid of the sequence by highlighting it and
hitting the Delete key and now go up to create a new sequence.
| | 04:02 | I could've typed Command+N, but this
gives me the chance to show off the menu.
| | 04:06 | By the way,
| | 04:07 | I don't like the sequence name that Final Cut uses, so I hit
the Delete key, hit the spacebar and type space, SEQ, and
| | 04:13 | I'll use DVCPRO HD.
| | 04:17 | And now the reason for this is the leading space forces all
my sequences to bubble up to the top and SEQ let's me
| | 04:24 | know that this icon represents a sequence and
not an imported multi-layer Photoshop graphic.
| | 04:29 | But on like HDV, which we bring in using Log and Capture,
| | 04:33 | when we're working with Sony VDU media or DVCPro HD P2 media or
AVC-Intra or AVCHD, all of those come in using Log and Transfer.
| | 04:46 | So we'll click on Log and Transfer and open this up,
| | 04:48 | and there's nothing here.
| | 04:52 | That's because we've got to tell it where media is stored and we go
up to this top left corner and click on the top left corner and on my
| | 04:58 | Scratch disk is a folder called P2 media and this contains
all the different cards that I shot on my trip to the seashore.
| | 05:06 | So I click on HD 05.
| | 05:07 | I don't need to select anything inside it. I simply select
the containing folder, click on Open and all of my shots show up
| | 05:16 | inside here.
| | 05:17 | Now just to show you we have different choices here, we've got
1080i 60 and 1080 24 and 1080 30 and all kinds of stuff to work with.
| | 05:28 | Here's kind of a cool secret.
| | 05:31 | If I Control-click on this Volume header up here or any
of the headers, I can have it go down and show frame rate.
| | 05:38 | Shooting Rate right here and I can see
| | 05:41 | the shooting rate of what I recorded.
| | 05:44 | So let me just scroll over.
| | 05:45 | And notice I'm doing 30, 24, 30, 24. So it shows me
automatically the different frame rates that I'm working with.
| | 05:52 | In fact, if you Control-click on here there's a whole
lot of metadata that this Log and Transfer window
| | 05:58 | is keeping track of.
| | 06:00 | Well let's go back to this first clip here
| | 06:03 | and if we play it, spacebar to play,
| | 06:08 | or click the right pointing arrow, the same
way as you would do inside the Viewer.
| | 06:13 | The J, K and L Keys works the same way. L to play,
K to stop, J to go backward. L to go at high-speed,
| | 06:20 | if you type it two or three times.
| | 06:22 | We're going at high speed and
| | 06:24 | it very nicely suppresses this sounds so we don't go deaf.
| | 06:27 | We have our same kind of controls that we're
used to inside the Viewer. The Shuttle wheel and
| | 06:33 | the Jog.
| | 06:37 | I tend to be a J, K, and L person to move
around quickly, but the nice thing is here.
| | 06:42 | Just as we have inside the Viewer, because it's already
recorded to the hard disk, Final Cut already knows how long this
| | 06:48 | clip is. There's the start of media, there's the end of media.
To set an in, we would click this button or type the letter I.
| | 06:55 | To set an out, we would click this button or type the letter O.
It's always set at the position of the playhead and so we'll put
| | 07:01 | our playhead right there and it shows us the timecode of
where the in is and the timecode of where the out is.
| | 07:07 | And we can move around inside it just the same as we can-
| | 07:10 | in other words, there's nothing new to
learn inside this Log and Transfer window.
| | 07:14 | It's exactly the same as we're used to working with inside the Viewer.
| | 07:17 | The top left box shows us the duration of the shot that we've
selected. The top right box shows us the timecode location and
| | 07:24 | because we want to bring in say, a 20 second clip, I'll select
the box and type 2-0-0-0. It automatically moves my out
| | 07:31 | so I now have exactly a 20 second shot.
| | 07:34 | So this is a browser which lists everything that was in the card,
| | 07:39 | but not yet what I moved into the computer.
I haven't ingested any of this yet.
| | 07:43 | This is a preview window which allows me to look at the footage,
decide if I like it, set an in, set an out, the exact same way
| | 07:49 | that I would do inside the Viewer.
| | 07:51 | Down at the bottom
| | 07:52 | is a Logging section and see how it's picked up the name of
the folder, HD 05, and that becomes the real ID. That's why I
| | 07:59 | create the folder and why I give it a name before I drag the
contents of the P2 card into the folder because I know it comes in
| | 08:06 | as the real ID. We're going to call this, let's see, 1080i,
| | 08:10 | let's call this DVCPro, D-V-C-Pro, HD
| | 08:15 | 1080i-60-Waves. I could fill in the scene, the shot take angle,
| | 08:23 | of the log note, this is a note...
| | 08:30 | This is a note that I can use to keep track
of my shots. I've got the same Good checkbox.
| | 08:35 | But notice that unlike Log and Capture, it doesn't build
the name based upon all these different fields, all these
| | 08:41 | different fields remain discreet, but it
did change the name of my clip up here.
| | 08:46 | Notice that each of these clips is a hollow circle. That means
that none of that clip is yet been captured into the computer.
| | 08:53 | Once I'm done, once I've set my in and my out, and I've
logged it, I can go to the Import settings and this gives me
| | 08:59 | a chance to select, if I uncheck Video, I'll just bring in audio.
| | 09:04 | Or if I uncheck audio, I'll just bring in video,
| | 09:07 | and if I decide to bring in audio
I can bring in all four audio tracks,
| | 09:12 | which is useful if you're feeding at four tracks of audio.
But if you just using the camera mic, you can turn off track
| | 09:17 | three and four because there's no audio on there.
| | 09:20 | And notice that with one and two this is exactly the same
icons that are used inside the Log and Capture window. By default
| | 09:27 | we bring in audio from the Panasonic P2 as a dual channel mono.
| | 09:32 | Dual channel mono means that odd number is panned center;
the even numbered channel is panned center and there is no
| | 09:40 | audio linkage between the volume of the odd number channel
and the even number channel. This is a perfect way to bring
| | 09:45 | in talking heads where you've got the reporter doing the interview
on track one and the guest being interviewed on track two.
| | 09:52 | There's no relationship between the volume of the reporter and
the volume of the guest and nor is there a left or right nest
| | 09:58 | to the sound because they're both just talking
on camera so they should both be panned center.
| | 10:04 | But if you are recording sound effects or recording music
then you would want the stereo effect. You want the odd number
| | 10:09 | track panned all the way to left, the even numbered track
panned all the way to right. Well, to do that you click on this
| | 10:15 | cassette icon and now there's a link. That link means that
the odd numbered track is panned left, the even-numbered track is
| | 10:22 | panned right and there is a link so that if I raise the gain on
track one, the gain on track two goes up or down by the same amount.
| | 10:32 | So the Import settings allow me to determine whether I'm
bringing in audio only, video only or both and what form the
| | 10:39 | audio is in. Dual channel mono, all four channels or one
pair stereo or one pair mono, you've got complete control.
| | 10:47 | This is your stereo linkage,
| | 10:49 | and this makes the track enabled to bring it in, or disabled.
| | 10:53 | Not able to bring it in.
| | 10:55 | OK, once we've gone through all of that now we have to tell
it to come into Final Cut so we'll add the clip to the queue.
| | 11:01 | And when we do notice the spinning gear, which says it's
importing the file and it's showing us exactly how much time is
| | 11:08 | left to bring that file in and it's being stored inside your capture
Scratch folder in a folder named after your Final Cut project.
| | 11:15 | And notice we see the file is coming in right there.
| | 11:20 | So far as long as you're not shooting 24 frame material or
more importantly, as long if you're not shooting 24 frame
| | 11:27 | material that you want to get back to
24 frames, you're done and good to go.
| | 11:32 | But if you're shooting 24 frame material and you want to
edit it at 24 frame, you want make sure of one more button.
| | 11:39 | And this button is right up here
| | 11:41 | and notice there's a choice called Preferences.
| | 11:44 | When you click on Preferences it says,
| | 11:47 | when I'm working with P2 media,
| | 11:50 | I'm going to remove advanced pulldown and any duplicate frames.
This is the appropriate choice for any 24 frame that
| | 11:58 | you're shooting except
| | 12:00 | for a 720p N. Native comes in and you would want to uncheck
this if you're shooting 720p, but leave it checked for
| | 12:09 | anything else that's 24 frames. If you're shooting 60 frames
or 30 frames, there is no pulldown. This is only in a 24 frame
| | 12:16 | shooting environment, and it is on by default.
| | 12:19 | So as long as you're shooting 24p,
| | 12:23 | you'll be fine to leave this on. If you're shooting 24p N,
the native format, the best advice that I've been seeing so far is
| | 12:31 | to turn this checkbox off.
| | 12:33 | So as long you know how to turn that checkbox on or off, depending
upon the format that you're shooting, you could then select,
| | 12:39 | click here and select. You could bring all these clips in at one time
| | 12:44 | and simply drag them down into here and they're all start
to import or you can change all of them as you see fit.
| | 12:50 | There's one more thing I want to show you. Let me close this window.
| | 12:55 | If I delete this clip, do Modify,
| | 12:59 | Make Offline
| | 13:03 | and we'll just send it to the disk.
| | 13:07 | One of the neat features inside the DVCPro HD is I can
reconnect clips and as long as you've named that folder and
| | 13:14 | you've given the unique name for the folder and you
haven't changed the folder name, you can select a file,
| | 13:20 | go up to File,
| | 13:22 | go down to Batch Capture,
| | 13:24 | and even though I've changed the name from its original name,
notice I've renamed it. This is the name that the P2 gave it,
| | 13:30 | but this is the name I gave it. I say Re-Import all media,
it will go out to your P2 folder and find the source media
| | 13:38 | and re-import it and re-link it back into Final Cut. This
is very cool in case you happen to erase a clip by mistake.
| | 13:46 | That's why having that folder to store your media and
naming it before you bring into Final Cut is so important.
| | 13:52 | It's going to be able to find that file and re-import it.
| | 13:59 | Works perfectly.
| | 14:00 | Final Cut does not read P2 media natively.
| | 14:04 | It's stored in MXF format which Final Cut can't read.
It needs to convert it from MXF format into QuickTime format.
| | 14:12 | The nice thing is the Log and Transfer process makes this
very easy to bring in entire clips, groups of clips or take a
| | 14:19 | look at a clip and bring in just a portion of it.
It's all done to the Log and Transfer window.
| | 14:24 | And now you know how that works.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Capturing AVCHD| 00:01 | Two of the newer formats that are out are AVCHD and AVC-Intra,
which are a joint creation between Panasonic and Sony.
| | 00:08 | Both formats are variations of H.264 compression, however,
only Final Cut 6.0.2 or later supports these formats and both
| | 00:17 | require a plug-in from Panasonic be installed before you can
use them. AVCHD is most often written to an SD card, which
| | 00:24 | is ingested using the log and transfer function. It's
exactly the same as what we just looked at with DVCPro HD.
| | 00:34 | AVC-Intra is an I-frame based compression scheme so it's
better than the AVCHD in terms of quality and editability
| | 00:38 | but it's only used by the Panasonic HP X3000 camera.
| | 00:42 | Again, neither format can be edited natively. Instead,
Final Cut needs to transcode them. But what it transcodes into
| | 00:49 | depends upon your computer. If you have
an Intel Mac, it'll transcode to ProRes 422.
| | 00:54 | If you have a G5 Mac, it'll transcode to
either DVCPro HD or AIC. You have the choice.
| | 01:01 | Now, you actually have a choice between when you want
to transcode to ProRes 422 or ProRes 422 high quality.
| | 01:07 | And I'll show you how to change that choice. We'll do
a flash to white. I'll fire up Final Cut. I don't have any
| | 01:13 | AVCHD footage to show you but I'll show you
where you can control how it gets transcoded
| | 01:18 | because that is buried in the Log and Transfer window.
| | 01:22 | Because AVCHD is not going to be edited natively,
| | 01:26 | you need to select the transcode format you're going to be
using, not AVCHD. So when we go to Final Cut Pro, Easy Setup
| | 01:33 | you want make sure that you select either
| | 01:36 | ProRes, if you working on an Intel machine, the Apple
Intermediate Codec, which is AIC, or DVC ProHD,
| | 01:44 | depending upon what you're going to be transcoding into.
| | 01:47 | Because that varies depending upon your CPU, you understand
how the process works, you just need to pick the correct version.
| | 01:53 | But here's how you set what it's going to
transcode to. When we go to File, Log and Transfer
| | 01:59 | we click on this little box right up
here and we go down to Preferences.
| | 02:04 | And the Preferences determine how we're going going to be
encoding AVCHD and if I had the plug-in installed for AVC-Intra,
| | 02:11 | I would see a choice down here for AVC-Intra as well.
Because I'm on an Intel-based Mac, it defaults to encoding
| | 02:18 | ProRes 422. If you need to change it, you can change
by clicking on these up or down arrows and select
| | 02:24 | the Apple Intermediate Codec or ProRes.
| | 02:26 | If you have the ability to go to ProRes,
ProRes is always your first and best choice.
| | 02:32 | If you have a choice between the Apple Intermediate Codec
and DVC Pro HD, you probably help a little higher quality with
| | 02:38 | the Apple Intermediate Codec.
| | 02:40 | But you probably have greater ease of editing with DVCPro HD.
| | 02:44 | I'd suggest doing a test and seeing which one works best
with your workflow. You control this by going up this pop-up menu
| | 02:51 | right here and selecting Preferences.
| | 02:54 | At which point the process of bringing in
AVCHD or AVC-Intra is the same as DVCPro P2.
| | 03:01 | And you can look at the DVCPro HD section to
learn exactly how the rest of this screen works.
| | 03:06 | Let's take a look at our next video format, XDCAM HD
| | 03:10 | and XDCAM EX.
| | 03:12 | We'll do that next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Capturing XDCAM| 00:00 | Whether you are shooting XDCAM HD or XDCAM EX,
| | 00:04 | to get into Final Cut you'll need to use the free Sony XDCAM
Transfer utility. To find this just do a Google search and look
| | 00:11 | for XDCAM transfer. You'll download it and install it.
The current version is version 2.1. What this utility allows
| | 00:17 | you to do is to transfer both XDCAM HD and XDCAM EX
video files into Final Cut. It allows you to log and
| | 00:24 | more importantly edit the metadata associated with the clips
that you shot and it allows you to search across the meta-
| | 00:30 | data to find specific clips that your looking for.
| | 00:33 | However, and here's a huge note, according to Sony,
XDCAM Transfer version 2.1 is not yet certified by Sony
| | 00:41 | to run on Leopard.
| | 00:42 | It works, but it may not be fully reliable.
| | 00:45 | In this training, we're going to run it on Leopard 10.5
and you'll see that we can in fact get it to work.
| | 00:50 | But keep in mind that Sony says that it's not totally
reliable yet. This is another good time for me to
| | 00:56 | pipe up and say just because Apple releases new software does
not mean you should upgrade to it immediately. Always give
| | 01:02 | any new operating system several months to settle down
before you start to upgrade, when you have that opportunity.
| | 01:08 | Ok, now that I'm off my soapbox let's take a look at how
the Transfer utility works and let's pull some XDCAM HD
| | 01:13 | footage into Final Cut.
| | 01:15 | We'll do that next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| XDCAM transfer, FCP setup, and import| 00:00 | To get XDCAM footage into Final Cut actually takes a couple of
different steps so let me show you what I've done. First is I
| | 00:06 | copied the footage from XDCAM to my hard drive. I didn't have
to do that, but it made my life a lot easier. So I copied
| | 00:13 | the XDCAM footage. You could simply leave it on the blue
ray disc that the XDCAM HD shoots it on, or you could copy
| | 00:20 | it from SxS card from XDCAM EX. For the SxS
card, I would definitely recommend copying it.
| | 00:25 | For the blue ray disc you could leave it on blue ray.
| | 00:27 | Now while that copied and that took awhile because it's about 9 GB of storage, my capture files are stored inside Final Cut Pro Documents.
| | 00:35 | This is what we recommend as part of the Essential
Training series is how to organize your files. If we open up
| | 00:40 | the Final Cut Pro Documents folder, notice I've created
a new folder called XDCAM. Inside it, I also created three
| | 00:47 | additional folders, a Cache folder,
an Export folder and an Import folder.
| | 00:52 | The first time you start XDCAM transfer, it's going to ask
where the cache, the export and the import folders are.
| | 00:58 | By creating them ahead of time, when that dialog box pops up,
| | 01:02 | which only shows up the first time you start XDCAM
transfer, you'll be able to point directly to those files.
| | 01:07 | I strongly recommend that you put your XDCAM footage inside
your Final Cut Pro Documents folders. That means all of your
| | 01:14 | media is stored in one place.
| | 01:17 | The next step is to start XDCAM transfer. We're going to do that
| | 01:21 | and I'll join you in just a second
after the application itself starts.
| | 01:25 | This is the Sony XDCAM Transfer software version 2.1.
| | 01:29 | You use the same software if you're using XDCAM EX or XDCAM HD.
| | 01:34 | And the operation is similar to the Log and
Transfer function that we've seen inside Final Cut.
| | 01:39 | The first thing we need to do is we need to tell the software
where the files are located. So down in the low left corner,
| | 01:45 | we click on Add and it pops up a dialog and I select
on my Scratch disk, the folder called XDCAM footage.
| | 01:53 | Now this entire folder contains the contents of one shoot.
| | 01:57 | If you had multiple shoots I'd have a folder
inside the XDCAM folder that is shoot disc one,
| | 02:03 | and shoot disc two and shoot disc three, and then
all these additional files which are on the blue ray disc
| | 02:08 | would simply get copied over. Because this is a single shoot
from a single disc, I just select the containing folder,
| | 02:15 | and I click on Open.
| | 02:17 | In a few seconds it opens up my XDCAM footage and loads proxies
in the top part of the screen with a large view window down here.
| | 02:25 | So this lists all the different disks that I have access to.
This lists all the different proxies, individual shots.
| | 02:33 | This allows me to look at it larger and to set
ins and outs and this is my logging information.
| | 02:38 | So we've got a couple of different clips here that we
want to look at. I'll just select clip nine because that's
| | 02:44 | one that I looked at that I know would work. We click on it once
and now when I skim it down here, I can see this is a hand-held shot.
| | 02:51 | This footage is courtesy of Jody Eldred by the way,
who shot this on a XDCAM HD camera, and I said,
| | 02:57 | "Jody please, oh please, can I borrow some footage?"
and he graciously shared this footage with me.
| | 03:02 | We're up on top of
| | 03:05 | police headquarters in LA and these are standard
police issue helicopters. Some people drive cars and
| | 03:12 | some people have more fun. So we're going to grab the shot here.
I'm going to position my playhead by dragging back and forth
| | 03:18 | and I'll set an in. The letter 'I' can
set the in or clicking this button here.
| | 03:22 | And as he walks around the helicopter we'll set an out right
about here. The letter O sets the out or you can click
| | 03:28 | that button, and I've got a shot which runs about eight
and half seconds. To preview the shot we can hit the
| | 03:34 | up arrow key and move to the in, hit the spacebar and we can
see that. It'd be nice to see it full screen so we click the
| | 03:40 | Full Screen button and it gives me the image and the spacebar allows
me to play it and spacebar stops. This was shot 1080p 24 frame.
| | 03:50 | The reason he shot 24 was his footage often integrates with
film projects for episodic television, and when you're working
| | 03:55 | with film, 24 frame is the best way to work. When you're not
working with film, 24 frame is not necessarily the best way to work.
| | 04:03 | I hit the Escape key to go back.
| | 04:06 | To go Full Screen, click the button; to get back, the Escape key.
| | 04:10 | Once we've got that shot marked with an in and out,
notice that it creates a subclip over here.
| | 04:15 | And I go to the Logging section and I can give
this a name when I click in the Clip section
| | 04:20 | and I'll say 'chopper walk around.'
| | 04:24 | I could add additional information here. I'm going to set the
status to have it being a Good shot and click Import. Now it goes
| | 04:32 | through and it imports the clip and notice we get an OK
button saying the clip has been successfully imported.
| | 04:37 | Where did it go?
| | 04:38 | Well, if we go back up to the Scratch disk, go to our Final Cut
Pro Documents folder, go to the XDCAM footage, go to Import,
| | 04:47 | XDCAM footage.
| | 04:49 | There's our clip right there.
| | 04:51 | Notice that it's named after the clip, C009,
and it's turned into a QuickTime movie.
| | 04:57 | And now I open that up, Command+0 to run it at half-size,
| | 05:02 | and there's the shot that we just pulled out of XDCAM HD
as our eight second walk around the helicopter shot.
| | 05:09 | If we were getting really carried away, because this is a hand-
held shot if I want to smooth it out I'd drop it into Final Cut and
| | 05:15 | apply a Smooth Cam filter and make it look like it was on a dolly,
but that's different training to do that so we'll just close this.
| | 05:21 | So let's do one more shot as long as we're at it.
Let's go down toward the bottom, the helicopter's now
| | 05:27 | flying and it's cruising along Pacific Coast Highway
| | 05:31 | on the west end of LA. We're heading south on Pacific Coast
Highway. We know itself because the ocean's to the right.
| | 05:38 | If we we're going north, the ocean would be to left. That's the only
way us LA people can tell which way is north, south, east and west,
| | 05:44 | is which way is the ocean? Hmmm, must be west.
| | 05:47 | So we'll set an in, type the letter I, and we'll cruise along
here checking for people and we'll type the letter O to set
| | 05:55 | an out and now that I've marked that clip we'll say
'Along PCH,' which is the Pacific Coast Highway and
| | 06:03 | we'll give this a Good status.
| | 06:06 | And we'll import the shot.
| | 06:08 | And now we've got another shot being imported
| | 06:11 | and we'll just double check to make sure that it's there.
Final Cut Pro Documents, XDCAM, Import, XDCAM Footage and now
| | 06:19 | we've got Along PCH and this guy right here, which should've
been called chopper walk around. So we'll just rename it here.
| | 06:27 | OK, good. Now close our folders, Command+W,
and we would do that for as many
| | 06:33 | XDCAM HD or XDCAM EX shots as we want. The next step is to
bring them into Final Cut. That requires starting Final Cut.
| | 06:40 | So we'll start Final Cut, then I'll
be back with you in just a second.
| | 06:44 | OK, now we've got Final Cut started so let's configure this
to work with XDCAM HD. As always we would go up to Final Cut Pro,
| | 06:51 | go down to Easy Setup and again these top two rows
are simply helping us to minimize the number of choices
| | 06:57 | that we see as we look in this Use
section and so we'll set this to HD.
| | 07:03 | And we'll leave the all rates alone and notice
that the XDCAM is all at the bottom because
| | 07:08 | now EX sorts toward the end. What can I say? And notice
that we've got all these different choices. It just so happens
| | 07:15 | that showed Jodi was shooting XDCAM HD 1080p 24 variable bit rate.
| | 07:21 | This is the highest quality imaging
that you can shoot. So for him- VBR
| | 07:25 | meaning the highest quality.
So set VBR and we'll click Setup.
| | 07:29 | Now whenever you change your preference settings it does
not affect any existing clips or projects or any existing
| | 07:36 | sequences. Because I hadn't edited anything into that
sequence, I want to delete it, change my preferences
| | 07:41 | and then create a new sequence.
| | 07:44 | When I double click to load it up into the Timeline
now we've got both are 16x9 Canvas and our Timeline.
| | 07:51 | Our footage has been stored in that XDCAM folder so we go File,
| | 07:54 | Import, Files,
| | 07:56 | and we go to Scratch disk,
| | 08:00 | Final Cut Pro Documents, and there's our XDCAM folder and
there's our Import folder. XDCAM footage, that's the folder
| | 08:07 | they came from. This would be called folder one or folder two,
or whatever you name the controlling folder and we'll select
| | 08:12 | Along PCH and hold the Shift key down
and select chopper, click Choose.
| | 08:17 | And we'll load our PCH clip in and play it inside Final Cut.
| | 08:23 | And instant XDCAM HD footage
| | 08:27 | from beginning to end and again,
we can take advantage of the View menu.
| | 08:31 | View, Video playback,
| | 08:34 | Digital Cinema Desktop Preview Main. Main means it goes to
your main screen. These other two, if I had a second monitor
| | 08:40 | attached, it would show on my second monitor.
| | 08:43 | Once you've set that, Command+F12 toggles it on.
| | 08:51 | Spacebar stops and starts, J, K and L keys work, up and down
arrow keys work, left and right arrow keys work- the same way
| | 08:57 | as if you're working in the Timeline and to get back out
hit Escape and you're back out again. So spacebar to play,
| | 09:04 | Command+F12 to view it full screen.
| | 09:07 | Escape to get back out.
| | 09:11 | Command+F12 to get in, Escape to get out and now
we're it to begin editing the XDCAM HD footage.
| | 09:17 | But there's more HD that we can bring in.
| | 09:19 | We'll talk about that next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Capturing uncompressed HD| 00:00 | When it comes to capturing uncompressed HD you remember the
checklist we talked about at the beginning of the training?
| | 00:06 | That checklist becomes vital at this point in time, but before
we go to actually capturing HD I want talk about a couple of
| | 00:13 | other setup settings first. If we go to Final Cut Pro, System Settings.
| | 00:18 | When System Settings is set correctly,
Final Cut's going to do a great job.
| | 00:22 | If System Settings is not set correctly,
| | 00:25 | there's nothing else you can do inside the application that's going
to make any difference because you're already rolling on square wheels.
| | 00:31 | Remember we talked about the data rates and uncompressed
HD can run into the hundreds of megabytes a second?
| | 00:37 | What this means is that you must have a RAID for your capture disk.
| | 00:41 | And make sure that you have all four of these checkboxes set
and you click on Set and you set this to your RAID and set it
| | 00:49 | on a folder called Final Cut Pro documents. I can just
grab here and drag it to make sure we see that clearly.
| | 00:55 | Final Cut will then create all the subsidiary folders.
| | 00:59 | Remember that scratch disks are not project based. Scratch
disks are system based. So you've set your scratch disks
| | 01:06 | once pointing to the RAID and then leave them alone.
Don't change them as you move from project to project.
| | 01:12 | Once you've done that and you've made sure that all four of
these checkboxes are checked for your RAID, my recommendation is
| | 01:18 | to set these of the three, Waveform, Thumbnail and Autosave,
also pointing to that RAID and also pointing to the same
| | 01:25 | Final Cut Pro Documents folder.
| | 01:27 | Finally to make sure that you got enough
space on your hard drive, just set this number
| | 01:32 | to 10,000, and that will give at least 10 GB of free space,
which is enough for all of your temporary files. And to make
| | 01:39 | sure that your hard discs don't fill up completely.
| | 01:42 | Because all of your files are now stored on a RAID you can
set your search folder to the exact same spot, Scratch disk,
| | 01:48 | Final Cut Pro documents. Click Choose. Memory & Cache.
| | 01:52 | If you've got more than a gigabyte of RAM on your system, then
I've found that things work a bit more smoothly if you set the
| | 01:58 | application memory percentage to 90%. This releases a
little bit of the memory available to the application to
| | 02:03 | background processes so they don't page out to disk quite so often.
| | 02:08 | If you're not doing a lot of still images, say less than 40
or 50 in your show, you can leave the Still Cache where it is.
| | 02:13 | If you're doing dozens and dozens of still images, especially
if the images are large images, I've found that it helps to
| | 02:19 | change this to 15%.
| | 02:22 | They don't have to total 100%. So I do 90%
for the application and 15% for the Still Cache.
| | 02:29 | The Thumbnail Cache, Disk and RAM, I leave alone.
| | 02:32 | The next thing that we do is we make
sure that we set our settings correctly.
| | 02:37 | Now here this is where because you're working with uncompressed
HD you're always going to be working with a capture card
| | 02:44 | and a capture card will give you different settings. If I go
to Easy Setup, what we have installed on our system for the
| | 02:49 | purposes of this training is we've installed a Black Magic
Design Intensity Pro card and we look at that. Notice that
| | 02:55 | all of these intensity settings are supplied by the people
we got the card from. If I had a Black Magic Deck Link card,
| | 03:03 | it would say Deck Link and I'd have
even more choices. If I had an Aja card,
| | 03:07 | I have even more choices with an Aja card.
So every capture card vendor supplies settings.
| | 03:13 | And notice what the settings consist of. Here for instance
under 1080i 60 frame, I can take HDCAM and I can convert it
| | 03:22 | to ProRes or I can converted to DVCPro HD, or I can
convert it to JPEG or I can just bring it in uncompressed.
| | 03:29 | Your highest qualities for high definition will be either
uncompressed, whose file sizes are seriously big,
| | 03:36 | but it's also the highest quality, or ProRes HQ.
| | 03:41 | Your lowest quality image, but your file sizes
will be the smallest, would be a JPEG image.
| | 03:47 | HDV would be slightly better than JPEG, DVCPro HD would
be better than HDV, but ProRes and uncompressed are
| | 03:53 | your highest qualities.
| | 03:55 | So remember the checklist that we kept. We want to make sure
that we have our image size correct. So it's either going to be
| | 04:01 | 720 or it's going to be 1080.
| | 04:03 | 720 is 1280x720. 1080 is 1920x1080.
| | 04:09 | Then you need to know whether you shot a progressive
| | 04:11 | or interlaced. The p is progressive, the i is interlaced.
Then you need to know how many frames per second you shot.
| | 04:18 | 24, 25, 50, 59.94, 60, whatever the
number happens to be, you then match
| | 04:25 | that checklist with these settings. This is the source on the
left. This is what it gets compressed into or converted into
| | 04:33 | on the right.
| | 04:34 | In this particular case I'll just select 1080i 59.94 uncompressed.
When I do, I'll click Setup and now the next sequence that
| | 04:43 | I create- File, New, Sequence. When I open it up,
| | 04:48 | and go up to Sequence, Settings. Notice that it's set for
high-definition television, 1080i, 16x9, square pixels because that's
| | 04:57 | uncompressed. Upper field dominant, which is different from
standard def, which is lower field. How many frames per
| | 05:03 | second, what it's compressed into, uncompressed 10-bit.
| | 05:06 | There it is right there
| | 05:08 | and how the audio gets handled.
| | 05:10 | Once you've got this set, the actual
process of log and capture is identical.
| | 05:16 | You set your in's the same way, you to set the out the
same way, you capture it using the log clip or capture clip.
| | 05:21 | You set it and capture it exactly
the same as if you're working with DV.
| | 05:25 | It's just your file sizes are a whole lot bigger,
| | 05:28 | and the key is to make sure that
Final Cut to set up properly first
| | 05:32 | and that your capture card is installed and working because
the capture cards going to do all the heavy lifting. It'll pull
| | 05:38 | the information in from tape, it's going to handle
the monitoring, it'll lay it off to tape when you're done.
| | 05:44 | This is a good illustration of how we pull HD into Final Cut.
| | 05:48 | But there's one more HD format I want to
talk about before we wrap up this section.
| | 05:52 | And that's what happens when you get video which is not
actually video. It's a series of still images as a sequence like
| | 05:59 | coming out of AfterEffects or a 3-D modeling package of your choice.
| | 06:02 | Image sequences are next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Importing HD image sequences| 00:00 | We received a collection of TIF still images from AfterEffects.
Chad Perkins up in Seattle put these together for us
| | 00:07 | and I want to thank him. He's a Lynda.com
author that talks on AfterEffects.
| | 00:12 | It always amazes me what you can do in that program. And
so he gave us a whole bunch of a TIF images, specifically
| | 00:17 | two seconds worth and notice that the images are sequentially
numbered, which happens when you export, and we want to bring
| | 00:23 | these into Final Cut. So here's how we do it.
| | 00:26 | We start Final Cut,
| | 00:29 | and the very first thing before we bring in any images is we want to
make sure they come in at the right length. So go up to Final Cut Pro,
| | 00:35 | go to User Preferences. Inside User Preferences,
go to the Editing tab. See this Still/Freeze Duration?
| | 00:42 | This determines the default length of any generated clips that
you create. The default length of any imported Photoshop files
| | 00:50 | and the default length of any imported still image files.
Because we want this footage to run at the same speed that
| | 00:56 | Chad created it, I'm going to set this to one frame.
| | 00:59 | And then when I click OK, any imported graphic
that I bring in will run exactly 1 frame.
| | 01:05 | Now if you're creating a Photoshop graphic for a still
for opening titles, that's going to be awfully quick.
| | 01:10 | But in our particular case, it'll be fine.
| | 01:13 | I also know that Chad did this is an RGB image because he saved
it as a TIF and it's done at 1280x720. So I go up to Final Cut Pro,
| | 01:21 | Easy Setup and I make sure that it says HD just to limit
this and I want to set this to be 720 progressive at
| | 01:28 | 60 frames a second,
| | 01:30 | which means that it's going at the right speed and it's uncompressed.
It's not going to change this in any way. So I click Setup.
| | 01:37 | Now because the sequence is created before I changed the
preferences, I want to create a new sequence to reflect the new
| | 01:43 | preference setting that I've made. And because I don't like the
way that Final Cut numbers, I'll change the name of the sequence to
| | 01:49 | space, Seq-image sequence. In this case, we'll call
it space, SEQ-fire, because it's a fire sequence.
| | 01:57 | All of our TIF images have been
gathered together into a single folder,
| | 02:02 | and so I go up to File, go down to Import. I don't want to
bring individual files in; I want to bring in that whole folder
| | 02:09 | that stores all of the images. So I say Import Folder.
In your case, it's inside the Exercise Files folder.
| | 02:16 | Says Exercise Files, inside the Media folder,
| | 02:20 | inside the TIF Image sequence. Notice these are grayed out,
because remember we're importing a folder. So I click on
| | 02:27 | the folder, click Choose and there's all of our TIF images
and they're all brought in at a duration of one frame.
| | 02:33 | So I'll double-click this. Open that up.
| | 02:37 | Double click my sequence to load that to the Timeline, Command+A
to select all of my images, drag the images down to the Timeline,
| | 02:45 | and poof! Hooty-kazooty. Wham. There it is.
| | 02:51 | There's our sequence. Shift+Z
| | 02:54 | and we've got all of our individual pieces. Notice that if I
hit the End key or the down arrow key, it always takes me one
| | 03:00 | frame past. So I want to back up one frame, set the out.
Here's another cool trick you can use. If you go up to View
| | 03:07 | and set View to Loop Playback,
| | 03:10 | the sequence loops perfectly. So when we play it we get the
embers glowing over and over again and it seamlessly loops.
| | 03:17 | You don't see the edit point go through.
| | 03:19 | Now you can edit this the same way as you would any clip. The thing
to keep in mind by the way is if you're just going to import this
| | 03:26 | and not do anything with the individual pieces, you might
consider exporting this is a self-contained QuickTime movie
| | 03:33 | and bring it back again. That way you can put a dissolve
on the front or the back that lasts over several frames.
| | 03:38 | Doing dissolves on individual one frame clips is time consuming.
Doing it on a self-contained QuickTime movie is a lot easier.
| | 03:46 | And again our View, Video Playback, Digital Cinema Desktop Preview
| | 03:52 | works exactly the same. Command+F12 to go in, spacebar to play,
| | 03:59 | Escape to get back out.
| | 04:02 | Same thing as if it were a clip. The key is to remember to be
sure to change your input. Here's one more thing to keep in mind.
| | 04:09 | It's in Sequence, Settings and go to the Video Processing tab.
| | 04:13 | Most the time when we're working in video, we're working in what
Apple calls YUV space, either 8-bit space or high precision space.
| | 04:20 | Both of these are appropriate when you're working with video.
However, there is a color shift if you take an RGB image
| | 04:26 | and render RGB as YUV. Rendering in YUV would be appropriate-
let's say we want to use this AfterEffects as background
| | 04:34 | and put a person on camera and chroma key in front of it.
They would be shot in YUV, you want your background
| | 04:40 | rendered in YUV, so leaving this set to YUV is appropriate.
| | 04:45 | But if you're doing everything coming out of your 3-D modeling
package and you don't want any color shifts and you're
| | 04:50 | not keying video in front of it, you're simply using Final
Cut to put all the pieces together, then you'd want to make
| | 04:56 | sure to always render in RGB. RGB means that there's not going
to be a color shift from RGB color space into YUV color space.
| | 05:04 | This only is true when you want to keep everything RGB.
If you're ultimately going to video, it needs to be in YUV,
| | 05:12 | which is the appropriate setting.
| | 05:14 | We've taken a look at now all different
ways of bringing high def into Final Cut.
| | 05:19 | In the next section, we'll take a look of how we can edit it
| | 05:22 | and how we can speed up the processing and rendering of our files.
| | 05:26 | All of that is coming up next.
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6. Editing HD in FCPOverview| 00:00 | Now that we've got the HD video into our project,
| | 00:03 | it's time to edit and more importantly render. I want to give you
some performance settings that can make Final Cut work even
| | 00:09 | more quickly when you're working in a high def environment.
| | 00:11 | First I'll show you how you can combine multiple video formats
using Final Cut 6's new feature called Open Format Timeline.
| | 00:19 | It's very cool and very easy to use. Then
some tips to improve performance during editing.
| | 00:24 | And notice I stressed it during editing, because you want
to change these before final output. First, you can decrease
| | 00:31 | image quality using Unlimited RT, which gives you
more real-time effects with less time spent rendering.
| | 00:37 | You can also decrease your render quality, but it's
critical that you reset this before you do final output.
| | 00:42 | Also keep in mind that I-frame based video renders and outputs
faster than GOP based video, which is one of the reasons
| | 00:48 | we converted HDV to ProRes because we get faster renders.
| | 00:52 | You can also decrease the render quality of Motion projects.
Remember also to reset this before final output and just as
| | 00:59 | a general purpose reminder, it's true of both standard
def and high def that don't display audio waveforms when
| | 01:05 | you're not editing audio because it takes a while for those waveforms
to draw back on the screen when you stop playing your project.
| | 01:10 | Finally I'll show you how to optimize render settings for
HDV or XDCAM HD or XDCAM EX. But let's get started by taking
| | 01:18 | a look at how we can combine multiple video formats
using Final Cut 6's Open Format Timeline. That's next.
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| The open format Timeline| 00:00 | We talked a lot about the Open Format Timeline in our
Essential Training on Final Cut Pro 6 and I want to summarize
| | 00:06 | some of the highlights here. For instance I've created
a sequence which is DV NTSC and we know that
| | 00:12 | it's a DV NTSC sequence by clicking on the Timeline
| | 00:15 | going up to Sequence, go down to Settings.
Notice that it's set to NTSC DV 720x480
| | 00:21 | with all the standard settings.
| | 00:22 | If I edit a DV clip into it, it will edit perfectly.
| | 00:26 | But what happens if I have to clip which is not DV? In
this case let's try this wave shot, which is DVCPro HD at
| | 00:32 | 720p, it's shot 24 frames a second.
| | 00:35 | And when I play it, it plays perfectly inside the Viewer because
the Viewer always plays stuff the way it is. It's the sequence
| | 00:41 | that starts to change things. So when
I edit this down a dialog box appears.
| | 00:46 | Let's just take a look at this. It says, "For best performance
of your sequence and the external video they should both be set to
| | 00:52 | the format of the clips you're editing." If I say No,
this DVCPro HD clip is fit, scaled into a 4x3 DV sequence.
| | 01:02 | We know that it's still DV because we go to
Sequence, Settings and notice it's still set to DV.
| | 01:07 | Notice it's added letterboxing top and bottom and
there's been a slight decrease in quality. If you notice,
| | 01:13 | the image is not as good a quality in the Canvas as
it is here because here it's playing as DVC Pro HD.
| | 01:19 | Here it's showing it as the quality of DV.
| | 01:22 | If we double-click this clip and load it up into
the Motion tab, notice it's been scaled to 75% size.
| | 01:28 | Larger images are always decreased in size
so the entire image fits inside the Canvas.
| | 01:35 | Now let's delete this shot.
| | 01:36 | Double-click this to load it back up into the Viewer.
And this time we're going to edit it and now we say Yes.
| | 01:41 | When we say Yes, the sequence settings change to
match the clip. This is now no longer a DV sequence.
| | 01:49 | If we go up to Sequence, Settings,
| | 01:51 | it's now a DVCPro HD sequence set to the appropriate size and
| | 01:56 | frame rate and everything else that we need so when we play this,
| | 01:59 | notice there's no letterboxing. It's now 16x9.
| | 02:02 | Saying No changes the clip
| | 02:05 | to match the sequence. Saying Yes changes the sequence
to match the clip. But this change can only exist
| | 02:12 | the first time you put a clip into the sequence. The very
first clip. As soon as you put a clip in, this sequence is
| | 02:19 | now locked. It now becomes a DVCPro sequence.
If I edit an HDV clip into it, which is 1080i,
| | 02:26 | when I edit this down,
| | 02:28 | the ever beautiful Katie is now scaled
| | 02:31 | smaller to fit a 720p sequence.
If I edit an XDCAM sequence down in here,
| | 02:39 | now I'm playing DVCPro HD and
I'm playing HDV and I'm playing XDCAM,
| | 02:47 | all in real-time in the same sequence and
they've all been scaled so that they remain as
| | 02:54 | DVC Pro HD 720p.
| | 02:57 | The power of the open format sequence is that you can change
your sequence settings when you put in your first clip,
| | 03:04 | so the sequence setting is conformed, changed, to match that first clip.
| | 03:09 | Now there is one other setting here.
| | 03:10 | And that's setting is under Final Cut Pro, User Preferences.
| | 03:14 | The Editing tab.
| | 03:16 | This determines what the autoformat Timeline is going to do.
By default it's set to ask whenever you put the first clip in.
| | 03:23 | If the clip doesn't match the sequence
settings, it'll ask what you want to do.
| | 03:27 | Or it will always change the sequence to match your clip
or it will never change the sequence to match your clip.
| | 03:35 | You've got the choice.
| | 03:37 | But the more important one is this one.
| | 03:39 | Always scale clips to sequence size. What this
really says is do you want to increase a smaller clip
| | 03:45 | so it fits inside a bigger sequence?
| | 03:48 | Now there's two choices here.
| | 03:50 | If you scale the clip it will fit the frame better,
but there will always be a decrease in image quality.
| | 03:56 | If you want the image to be the highest
possible quality, you do not want to check this.
| | 04:00 | But then it won't fill the frame.
| | 04:02 | The highest quality you can get any piece of video is 100%.
Anything bigger than 100% percent will show scaling
| | 04:08 | artifacts and it won't look very good.
| | 04:10 | So you always want to make sure that you're clear that
although you can make a picture bigger, you're not adding any more
| | 04:16 | information. All your doing is making it softer and making
it look little bit artifact-y because you blown up those pixels.
| | 04:21 | So the Open Format Timeline makes it easy in real time to
edit all these different formats and output them. Remember the
| | 04:28 | first clip into the sequence gives the sequence a chance to
change its settings, and once you have a clip in the sequence,
| | 04:34 | the sequence is locked and all the
other clips will match those settings.
| | 04:38 | It's the Open Format Timeline. It's new inside Final
Cut 6 and it's something they can make working with multiple
| | 04:44 | different video formats a whole lot
easier than it ever has been in the past.
| | 04:48 | I was reviewing the section and realize it could be
some confusion or so let me just illustrate one thing.
| | 04:53 | Notice under Sequence, Settings,
| | 04:56 | I pointed out that this sequence was set to 720p 24
but notice under Compressor it's set to 720p 60.
| | 05:03 | Well please don't confuse the frame rate of
your sequence, which is the editing timebase,
| | 05:08 | with the frame rate of compression.
DVCPro HD always shoots at 60 frames a second.
| | 05:12 | That doesn't means that because it shoots it's
going to play them all back. They flag of frames
| | 05:17 | and in flagging the frames, it flags it to be at 60 frames or
30 frames or 24 frames or whatever you want to frame rate to be.
| | 05:24 | So the editing time base illustrates
| | 05:26 | the frame rate of your sequence.
| | 05:28 | The Compressor simply means how the video itself is compressed.
| | 05:32 | So this is actually a 24 frame sequence,
| | 05:35 | using video compressed with those settings. It can be confusing
and I wanted to make sure you weren't confused as you looked at this.
| | 05:42 | Coming up next
| | 05:43 | are some other performance tips that we can use, that can
speed up the process not just of editing but of rendering.
| | 05:49 | A whole bunch of small ideas that can add up to
a lot of time saved. We'll talk about all of those
| | 05:54 | next.
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| Improving perfomance while editing| 00:00 | Here's a collection of tips you can use to improve your
performance while editing and really what they're doing
| | 00:04 | is they're balancing render quality to get more speed.
| | 00:08 | Let me give you an example.
| | 00:09 | First if we go over to the RT menu,
| | 00:12 | notice that we have two choices. We have Safe RT and Unlimited RT.
| | 00:15 | Safe RT always plays our image at the highest possible quality.
| | 00:19 | Unlimited RT plays the image at the lower
quality to give us more real-time effects.
| | 00:25 | Safe RT looks better, but requires more rendering.
Unlimited RT doesn't look as good, but requires less rendering.
| | 00:32 | Whether you select Safe RT or Unlimited RT,
| | 00:35 | you will always output and export at the highest possible
quality. These have no impact on export. They do, however,
| | 00:42 | have a great deal of impact on editing.
| | 00:44 | Most of my stuff is not effects based. Most of the time I
run in Safe RT but whenever I get into an effects heavy piece,
| | 00:51 | I move it to Unlimited RT, decrease my quality of
the video during editing and spend less time rendering.
| | 00:57 | Once you've selected, say Unlimited RT by checking
it, now you've got a couple choices down here.
| | 01:02 | Dynamic means that Final Cut will dynamically scale the video
quality. When it hits a hard patch, it makes the quality go less.
| | 01:09 | If it's not too bad, the quality stays high.
| | 01:12 | It'll also scale the frame rate,
| | 01:14 | it'll play fewer frames per second.
| | 01:16 | It drops it; it doesn't do slow-motion,
it just doesn't play the frame.
| | 01:19 | And plays fewer frames per second, which means that it can
concentrate more on creating your effect. Again, this is for
| | 01:25 | editing purposes. Output is always at the highest quality.
| | 01:28 | Let's illustrate.
| | 01:30 | I'm going to stay in a Safe RT,
that's the top choice, select this clip.
| | 01:34 | Go to Effects,
| | 01:36 | Video Filters, Distort and the ever handsome, every incredible Pond Ripple.
| | 01:41 | So we select Pond Ripple. Notice
that we've got a red render bar here.
| | 01:45 | If I try to play that, I'll have to wait for it to render.
| | 01:48 | I hate waiting for it to render.
| | 01:50 | So I go to the RT menu,
| | 01:52 | I select Unlimited RT
| | 01:54 | and notice of my red render bar changes to orange.
| | 01:57 | This means that Final Cut can play an approximation of that effect
| | 02:01 | in real-time without rendering it and we watch.
| | 02:04 | There's our Pond Ripple effect. What it's doing is is not
playing the full frames per second, and it's not playing
| | 02:10 | at the highest quality,
| | 02:11 | because we got both of these set to Dynamic.
| | 02:14 | Let me just set this to Low
| | 02:15 | and set this to Quarter.
| | 02:17 | Quarter means it plays, instead of playing at 30 frames a
second, it plays a quarter of 30 frames or 7 1/2 frames a second.
| | 02:24 | High means it plays every line, every pixel. This is every
other line and this is every other line, every other pixel.
| | 02:31 | So,
| | 02:32 | when we play this now we get a much jerkier,
lower quality playback, but I play it in real time.
| | 02:38 | Sometimes I just want to see and say yep, that really is
the ugliest effect I have ever seen in my entire adult life.
| | 02:44 | So we'll set this back to Dynamic
| | 02:46 | and we'll set this back to Dynamic and we'll
leave a note to self- Self, don't use pond ripple.
| | 02:52 | So we double click this,
| | 02:53 | go to the Filters tab and delete it.
| | 02:56 | Another way to improve performances is
to play with render quality. Now here,
| | 02:59 | this is going to depend upon the speed of your
processor and the video format you're working with.
| | 03:05 | Most the time I don't recommend messing with render quality,
but seeing is is is a special sequence on talking about
| | 03:11 | improving performance, I'll show you how this works.
| | 03:13 | Select the Timeline, go to the Sequence menu,
go to Settings, click on the Render Control tab.
| | 03:20 | You don't want a mess with the frame rate because if you do it's
going to make your render run much quicker than the actual video itself.
| | 03:26 | So the Frame Rate should stay at 100%,
| | 03:28 | but experiment with different Resolution settings.
| | 03:31 | This changes the resolution of your render frame.
| | 03:34 | So instead of being equal to the resolution of
your video, it's at half size or quarter size.
| | 03:39 | So if I set this to 25%,
| | 03:42 | my renders
| | 03:43 | can occur more quickly because it
doesn't have to render as much information.
| | 03:47 | Most of the time I'll leave it set to 100%, but if you're
just flat out crushed for time, changing your resolution
| | 03:53 | to 25%, but leaving your frame rate alone
| | 03:56 | can make a difference.
| | 03:57 | Here's another setting.
| | 03:58 | Keep in mind that when you're working with Motion projects
you can also control the Motion Quality setting.
| | 04:04 | By default it's set to Normal.
| | 04:06 | This is for both Motion projects and Motion templates.
| | 04:09 | If you set this to Draft, the quality of
your Motion project is going to render
| | 04:14 | with less quality.
| | 04:16 | Then when you're ready to output you would set this to Best and your
Motion project and your Motion templates are going to look better.
| | 04:22 | Be sure also when you do that that you
set your render file resolution to 100%.
| | 04:27 | Both of these have to be reset manually because
they won't automatically change when you output.
| | 04:32 | So if you don't reset them, your resolution of your render files
and the resolution of your Motion projects are both going to be
| | 04:37 | degraded, which we want to avoid.
| | 04:39 | So if you absolutely need to pick up the most speed,
| | 04:42 | set Motion projects to Draft, set Resolution to 25%,
| | 04:46 | and set your RT menu to Unlimited RT and things will
go a whole lot quicker especially on slower machines.
| | 04:52 | But there's one more setting that I want to
showcase for you, but that deserves it's own movie.
| | 04:58 | And we'll talk about HDV
| | 05:00 | next.
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| Rendering HDV footage| 00:00 | This next feature showed up brand-new with
Final Cut Pro 6, but it continues to impress me
| | 00:04 | and I want to make sure you're aware of it.
| | 00:06 | Because you don't have to render HDV footage as HDV.
| | 00:10 | Here for instance, we got about a 12 second clip
of the ever beautiful Katie stretching and waking up.
| | 00:16 | If I select all of these clips by typing Command+A
| | 00:20 | and applying the Pond Ripple filter, which requires
rendering, and notice that I'm in Safe RT mode.
| | 00:27 | My intrepid assistant and I just calculated this,
| | 00:30 | it took 37 seconds to render on this gear.
| | 00:33 | You can test this on your own system, if you have the exercise files.
| | 00:37 | But we can speed this up by 35%,
| | 00:40 | make it render much more quickly by going to Sequence,
| | 00:43 | Settings
| | 00:45 | and changing Render Control from Same as Sequence Codec
| | 00:50 | to Apple ProRes 422.
| | 00:53 | When we click Apple ProRes 422 and click OK
and then render, what used to take us
| | 00:59 | 37 seconds, I'll just say Render All, click it.
| | 01:03 | It's going to take less than 25 seconds, 35% faster,
| | 01:09 | because we're rendering in ProRes.
| | 01:11 | The only downside is, and it's a big one,
| | 01:14 | is your file sizes are about 4 1/2 times bigger.
| | 01:17 | And they require more data throughput so if you've got
a really, really slow hard disk this is not going to work,
| | 01:23 | but most of the time we've got big enough hard drives and
we've got fast enough throughput to support the ProRes 422
| | 01:31 | low-end version, which only goes at 18 MB a second.
We can support that on even a FireWire 400 drive.
| | 01:37 | Saving 35% of the time it takes to render
| | 01:42 | is a significant savings and well
worth moving into a ProRes environment.
| | 01:48 | You can only render 3 formats in ProRes, HDV
| | 01:52 | XDCAM HD and XDCAM EX. Those are the only three
| | 01:57 | and you change your sequence settings
| | 02:00 | and that's under Render Control.
| | 02:02 | And this changes the sequence.
| | 02:05 | Or you go up to Final Cut Pro,
| | 02:07 | User Preferences.
| | 02:09 | Render Control under User Preferences and you can change it
and this then becomes the default setting for all new projects.
| | 02:17 | And the other nice thing about rendering in ProRes is you're
moving out of the 8-bit environment of HDV and XDCAM into the
| | 02:24 | 10-bit environment of ProRes. You're going to end up with much
higher quality images, especially when you do color correction
| | 02:30 | or any kind of high-end compositing with gradients.
You'll notice the improvement in quality
| | 02:34 | because your renders are being done in ProRes.
| | 02:36 | One other thing I mentioned that I almost forgot to touch on
and I should, remember I said that you get faster performance if
| | 02:42 | you keep audio waveforms off?
Well, let's just add out our shorebird here.
| | 02:47 | And when we do that,
| | 02:50 | notice that there's no waveforms displayed. The keyboard
shortcut to turn waveforms on and off is Option+Command+W.
| | 02:56 | When you're editing audio, turn waveforms on;
| | 02:59 | when you're not editing audio, Option+Command+W turns waveforms off.
| | 03:04 | And I feel fulfilled because I want to get both
of those out before we wrapped up this chapter.
| | 03:09 | But there's still more to talk about
| | 03:10 | and that is outputting.
| | 03:12 | And we'll talk about outputting next.
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7. Outputting Overview| 00:00 | In this chapter I want to show you the best way to export
your projects and the best way to output your projects.
| | 00:05 | We talk about both of these in a lot of detail in the
Essential Training on Final Cut so this is just an overview.
| | 00:11 | If you need a lot more specifics,
take a look inside that Essential Training.
| | 00:15 | Also, if you need to output to a tape format for a tape deck
that you don't own, consider transcoding it to a QuickTime movie
| | 00:22 | whose specs match your deck. Then take that QuickTime file to
a postproduction facility for output tape. I've done this on a
| | 00:29 | number of occasions. It's worked fine. However, I urge you to
test it first. Take a short file over the post house
| | 00:34 | to make sure everything works okay. Also one other note. You
need to be sure to allow time for conforming Long-GOP based video.
| | 00:42 | If you're working with HDV or XDCAM,
it's going to take longer to output than
| | 00:46 | if you're working with ProRes or DVCPro HD
because we need to conform or convert
| | 00:52 | from the file format that Final Cut uses for editing into
the Long-GOP based format that's native to HDV or XDCAM
| | 00:58 | and sometimes that conforming to take a lot longer than you expect.
| | 01:02 | So before deadlines rear their ugly head, do a test output
and see how long it takes. That way when you have to hit a
| | 01:08 | FedEx deadline and you hit the 'render,
let's get this thing out of here' button,
| | 01:12 | and it says it's just going to take about 800,000 hours.
| | 01:15 | Then you want to know this ahead of a time and not be surprised.
| | 01:18 | Anyway, let's talk about the best way to export your projects.
| | 01:20 | That is next.
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| Exporting| 00:00 | Well it's time to export our completed sequences so
let's pretend this sequence is done and ready for export.
| | 00:06 | Exporting, by the way, is done when you want
to create a file that the computer can read.
| | 00:11 | Outputting is when you want to create
a tape that can be played on a tape deck.
| | 00:15 | Well we want to export so we go to File, Export and oh my goodness!
Look at all those choices. What are we...? So how can...?
| | 00:23 | Oh man. I could start hyperventilating
just looking at all those choices.
| | 00:27 | Well in point of fact,
| | 00:29 | these are all technical,
| | 00:30 | and for what we're doing, exporting a
final sequence, we can ignore all of them.
| | 00:35 | We're not going to LiveType or Soundtrack, so we can
ignore those two. We really have only three choices.
| | 00:40 | QuickTime Movie, Using Compressor
| | 00:42 | and QuickTime Conversion.
| | 00:44 | If you want something to be really, really fast,
but you don't care about the quality,
| | 00:48 | QuickTime Conversion may be okay,
but I really don't recommend it.
| | 00:51 | Using Compressor gives really, really high quality
but it takes six to 10 times longer than real time.
| | 00:57 | Really the only choice that makes the most
sense is to export using QuickTime Movie.
| | 01:02 | Now there's one exception to this.
| | 01:04 | If your project contains lots and lots of Motion files,
I have been told that we'll get higher quality Motion project
| | 01:11 | export when you use Compressor.
| | 01:13 | Not a lot better, but just better.
| | 01:15 | The problem is very rarely do I need to have a
single file created and many times I need to create
| | 01:20 | multiple iterations of the file.
| | 01:22 | Exporting using Compressor makes that difficult. For me,
my recommendation is to always export using QuickTime Movie.
| | 01:29 | Now when we export as a QuickTime Movie we
have to give this a name. I'll just call this Katie
| | 01:34 | and we need to figure out where we're going
to store it and I'll store it to the desktop.
| | 01:38 | It's really what happens with these choices down here.
| | 01:41 | Current Settings is always the highest quality. Always.
| | 01:46 | Because it matches the settings of your sequence. Now I can
change this and do a transcode but even though I transcode it,
| | 01:53 | I'm not going to get higher quality than
what already exists inside the sequence.
| | 01:57 | And 99.5 percent of the time,
| | 01:59 | including audio and video is self-evident,
and if you're including markers for a DVD,
| | 02:04 | you want to make sure that gets set to DVD Studio
Pro Markers. That exports everything that you need.
| | 02:09 | It really comes down to a choice.
Do you make the movie self-contained or not?
| | 02:12 | The quality of the self-contained movie and
the quality of a reference movie is identical.
| | 02:18 | It's just that the self-contained movie contains copies of
all of your digital files while the reference movie points to
| | 02:25 | the master files that are stored on your disk. If you're
the one that's going to be compressing this then a reference
| | 02:30 | movie in most cases will be fine. If somebody else's going to be
compressing it, than the self-contained movie makes a lot more sense.
| | 02:36 | There's really only four reasons to create a self-contained movie.
| | 02:39 | You're going to give the movie to somebody else.
| | 02:41 | You going to keep it on your system for a long
period of time. You're trying to solve an output problem.
| | 02:46 | Or you're working with Long-GOP based media.
| | 02:49 | HDV, XDCAM HD, XDCAM EX cannot be a reference movie.
| | 02:54 | They must be self-contained.
| | 02:56 | This is HDV. I make it self-contained, I click Save and
hooty-kazooty. In a few seconds. Much, much faster than real time.
| | 03:05 | My HDV movie has been totally exported
and built and saved to the hard disk.
| | 03:09 | File, Export, QuickTime Movie
| | 03:12 | is your best choice for exporting.
| | 03:15 | If you have additional questions, take a look at our
Essential Training on Final Cut Pro 6 or Final Cut Pro 5.
| | 03:20 | It will explain it in more detail,
| | 03:22 | but there's something else I want to talk about.
| | 03:24 | And that's what happens if you're laying off to tape.
| | 03:26 | That requires outputting
| | 03:28 | and that is next.
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| Outputting| 00:00 | You export you want to create a file the computer can read.
You output when you want to lay something off to tape.
| | 00:07 | When you need to output,
| | 00:08 | don't ever, ever play the Timeline.
| | 00:11 | Because Final Cut has decreased the playback quality of the
Timeline to give us more real-time effects, simply hitting
| | 00:18 | the spacebar and playing the Timeline, which we
used to do in versions of Final Cut 3 and earlier,
| | 00:22 | is absolutely the wrong way to go now because you're
not getting high quality audio nor high-quality video.
| | 00:29 | If you're laying off to tape, you always
want select one of two choices, Print to Video
| | 00:34 | or Edit to Tape.
| | 00:35 | The quality of these two choices is identical.
| | 00:38 | Print to Video is the easiest.
| | 00:41 | So when you're ready to lay off to tape Print to Video should
always be your first choice, unless you need to record at
| | 00:48 | a specific timecode on the tape.
| | 00:50 | If you need to record your sequence so it starts at one hour,
zero minutes, zero seconds and zero frames- or in Europe,
| | 00:57 | 10 hours, zero minutes, zero seconds and
zero frames- then you need to edit that to tape.
| | 01:01 | Because Edit to Tape allows you to
specify the starting timecode of the tape.
| | 01:05 | If on the other hand, you need simply to print to video,
you want to lay it off to tape and you don't care about what
| | 01:10 | the timecodes going to be, Print to Video meets the need.
| | 01:13 | If you need specific instructions on how to Print to Video or
how to Edit to Tape, again the Final Cut Pro Essential Editing
| | 01:19 | can make your life a lot easier. But for here, I just
wanted to showcase the two choices that you've got and
| | 01:24 | to emphasize that you do not want to play the Timeline,
| | 01:28 | because that is not going to give you
the quality that you need or the quality you expect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. TranscodingOverview| 00:00 | Transcoding is the process of converting video from one
format to another, such as converting HDV to ProRes 422.
| | 00:08 | There are four reasons why you'd want to transcode. First you
want to convert video into a format that's easier to edit.
| | 00:14 | This is what we do with AVC-HD.
We convert AVC-HD into ProRes during capture.
| | 00:20 | Or to standardize multiple video formats into one format.
You've got DV and digi-beta and HDCAM and HDV and
| | 00:28 | you want to bring them all together
and edit them all as a single format.
| | 00:32 | Or you want reduce the file size of a video
format, say from HDCAM SR down to ProRes.
| | 00:38 | Or you want to convert from high-definition
to standard definition for final distribution.
| | 00:43 | Now here there's a lot of argument.
| | 00:45 | When's the best time to convert from high def down to
standard def? And you've got a lot of different options,
| | 00:50 | but one that I strongly recommend you do not do
is do not use the down convert inside your camera
| | 00:57 | to down convert during capture from HDV or DVCPro HD to
standard def. And the reason is the camera manufacturers have not
| | 01:05 | put particularly good down convert chips in the camera and
you're not going to be happy with the quality and if you
| | 01:11 | compare down converted video from the camera to down
converted videos say through Compressor or even Final Cut,
| | 01:18 | it's going to look better if you down convert after you get
it captured, not during the process outputting from the camera.
| | 01:24 | Yeah, the camera's easier and yes it's faster,
| | 01:27 | but you're not going to get the quality you expect.
| | 01:29 | There's a couple common transcodes that I want to illustrate
here, for instance how do we convert HDV to ProRes 422?
| | 01:35 | One way we can do it, if you've got a fast enough computer,
is to do it during the actual capture process itself.
| | 01:40 | Remember we changed the codec to HDV to ProRes?
| | 01:44 | But what happens if you got a whole lot of HDVs sitting
on your desktop and you want to get it all converted?
| | 01:49 | Compressor works really well for that.
And I'll show that to you in just a second.
| | 01:52 | But what happens if you want to transcode from a really big
format like HDCAM to HDCAM SR down to ProRes or DVCPro HD?
| | 02:00 | This would be useful if you know you to spend
next three or four months editing this project.
| | 02:04 | Rather than have to schlep those huge files and invest
in very expensive RAIDs, you could down convert them to
| | 02:11 | something smaller, ProRes, edit in ProRes
and do an offline, online situation.
| | 02:16 | Another common transcode is to convert high definition to
standard definition because you've want to release it today on
| | 02:22 | DVD and make some money with it. So I'll show you
these three and we'll start with HDV to ProRes next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Transcoding HDV| 00:00 | In the past, when we wanted to convert an HDV clip into
a different format our only real option was Final Cut.
| | 00:06 | And there were a couple different ways we could do it.
| | 00:08 | For instance, if I wanted to export this clip,
| | 00:11 | I would type the letter X to set an in
and out for that clip, go up to File,
| | 00:16 | Export, QuickTime Movie. I'd make it a
self-contained movie and I'd change the setting.
| | 00:21 | Perfectly okay but not really good quality. And if I had
a lot of clips to do, I could only do one clip at a time.
| | 00:29 | The second option became to select the clips that
we wanted to export, up in the browser, go to File
| | 00:35 | Batch Export.
| | 00:37 | It then lists all the clips for we want to export in this batch.
We would then click the Settings file and then we would
| | 00:42 | change the item settings to be whatever format we want.
| | 00:46 | The benefit to using batch settings
as I can easily feed multiple clips.
| | 00:50 | The disadvantage is we're still not taking advantage of
all the latest technology that Apple makes available to us.
| | 00:56 | So while this works, it's no longer the recommended option.
| | 00:59 | Instead we're much better off using Compressor.
| | 01:03 | So let me hide Final Cut
| | 01:05 | and switch over to Compressor.
| | 01:08 | If you need specific instructions on how to use Compressor,
we've got a really good title, if I do say so myself, on Compressor.
| | 01:15 | In this case, I just want to show you how
Compressor works to do down conversion of HDV.
| | 01:19 | We'll open up our exercise files and I'll grab this
Katie CU shot and drag it into the gravity well here and
| | 01:27 | if I were to play this clip by grabbing this handle and drag it
back and forth, we can see the ever beautiful Katie standing up.
| | 01:33 | Okay good. Now, that's the clip that I want to process. I'm
just doing one clip but you could just as easily do 10 clips
| | 01:39 | or a hundred clips or a thousand clips.
| | 01:41 | Because Compressor can deal with batches, it makes
handling lots of clips all at one time a lot easier.
| | 01:47 | Now over in the Settings tab, I'm going to twirl down
the Settings and I'll find something called Other Workflows.
| | 01:54 | Twirl down Other Workflows and notice
that it's got Advanced Format Conversions.
| | 01:58 | And in Advanced Format Conversions is a setting called Apple Codecs
| | 02:03 | and under Apple Codecs- we just make this bigger-
| | 02:06 | we have four different ProRes choices.
ProRes 422 for interlaced material,
| | 02:12 | ProRes 422 for interlaced material
in a high-quality form of ProRes,
| | 02:16 | ProRes 422 for progressive material,
| | 02:19 | and ProRes 422 for progressive and high quality.
| | 02:23 | When you're working with HDV, there is no reason
to use the high-quality version of ProRes.
| | 02:28 | The quality isn't there to begin with. ProRes by itself,
| | 02:32 | ProRes 422 but not the high quality version, will give
you smaller file sizes with no sacrifice in quality.
| | 02:39 | Because this video was shot on a Sony camera
I happen to know that it was 1080i 60.
| | 02:44 | Sony cameras and Canon cameras tend to
shoot 1080i. JVC cameras tend to shoot 720p.
| | 02:50 | That's just a sort of a 'And oh by the way' that
you can drop into a party sometime and impress people.
| | 02:55 | But just like we had to build our checklist to figure out all
the different settings that we use, our checklist showed that
| | 03:00 | this is a 1080i 60 clip. So I'll grab ProRes 422 for
interlaced material, that's what the letter I stands for,
| | 03:07 | drop it right on here and now it's applied
this compression setting to that clip.
| | 03:12 | I'll Control-click on the source and change the destination
to the desktop or you could set it to any other folder you want.
| | 03:18 | Because I want it to show up quickly
I'm going to put it on the desktop.
| | 03:21 | And this is the filename. In this case I could change the filename,
but I'll just leave it all here. To change it just double
| | 03:27 | click on the text you want to change, just like a word
processor you'll change it. Now that we've selected our clip,
| | 03:33 | we've applied how we want it to be transcoded and we've
told it where we want it to go, we click the Submit button
| | 03:38 | in the low right corner,
| | 03:40 | and it asks us for a name of the batch and we'll
call it Katies, call it transcoding. Trans-coding.
| | 03:47 | Submit.
| | 03:49 | This computer is so fast that I can't even show you the compression
occurring because by now, it's already done. So I'm going to
| | 03:57 | hide this, Command+H, and there's our video. I'm
going to double click it to load it up into QuickTime.
| | 04:03 | Command+0 to make it small enough to see what's going on.
We play it and- oh of my goodness! We've got a crisis.
| | 04:10 | Katie is even skinnier than she was before.
| | 04:13 | The problem is that QuickTime always
shows your video as square pixels.
| | 04:19 | Notice it at showing you at 1440x1080.
| | 04:23 | The image is to supposed to be 1920, but HDV doesn't use
square pixels. HDV uses rectangular pixels and QuickTime will
| | 04:31 | always show you your video using square pixels,
which means things looks stretched and squished.
| | 04:37 | Now we have two options. Option one is we can run out of the building
screaming and start running in front of large moving trucks.
| | 04:44 | It's an option, but I would not recommend it. Instead, we
don't judge the aspect ratio of our video by looking at it
| | 04:51 | inside QuickTime.
| | 04:52 | Instead we import it
| | 04:54 | into Final Cut.
| | 04:56 | And when we import it into Final Cut,
| | 04:58 | and double click the clip and load it up into the Viewer,
notice that the ever beautiful Katie looks as beautiful and
| | 05:05 | as un-stretched as ever.
| | 05:07 | So when you want to change the format of HDV, although you
can do so inside Final Cut, I think you'll be happier with
| | 05:15 | the quality you get inside Compressor.
| | 05:18 | If you need specific help on using Compressor, take
a look at our Compressor training that we've got here.
| | 05:23 | But if you don't, if you just want to know
the specific cookbooks, you load the clip,
| | 05:28 | you apply the ProRes interlaced or
progressive setting. Don't need to use HQ.
| | 05:33 | You then give it a destination.
| | 05:35 | You click Submit,
| | 05:37 | and in the background while you're busy doing
other things, all your clips will be converted.
| | 05:42 | Your master clip, the source clip, is never touched. It will
create a copy for you and at that point, you can take that new
| | 05:47 | ProRes clip and edit it the same way
as you would any other piece of video.
| | 05:51 | But there's more transcoding that we can talk about
and that's how we take a larger clip like HDCAM
| | 05:56 | and downconvert it to something smaller.
| | 05:59 | That one's easier
| | 06:00 | because you already know all the steps
| | 06:02 | and I'll show it to you next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Transcoding uncompressed HD| 00:01 | Sometimes our file sizes are so big that we have to
transcode. For instance, here I took our embers example and
| | 00:08 | I created a high-definition version and look at how big this
file is. It's only two seconds long and yet it's 210 MB in size.
| | 00:18 | That's 105 MB a second.
| | 00:22 | It's almost- look at this- 707 Mb a second. That's just huge.
It's more than a single hard drive can keep up with. Well if I only
| | 00:30 | have to edit just a few pieces, I can get a RAID and I can edit
this stuff and it would be great, quality's going to be spectacular.
| | 00:36 | But what happens if you spend five or eight months editing
this and you don't have just a half-hour, you've got dozens and
| | 00:42 | dozens of hours? Well at it's native quality, the file sizes
are so huge, you'll fill up any RAID. So what we need to do is
| | 00:48 | we want to make this file smaller yet keep
the time code matching and keep the basic
| | 00:52 | image size and shape matching so we can edit this, but without
having to invest in the most expensive high-end of equipment.
| | 00:59 | So the way we're going to work this is we're going to
use Compressor to scale it down. I'll open up Compressor.
| | 01:06 | Open up our exercise files, grab my file and drag it into
| | 01:10 | the source well here.
| | 01:11 | And now I'll twirl down the Settings
tab and again go to Other Workflows.
| | 01:18 | Now we have a couple of different options with Other Workflows.
We could convert this into, under Advanced Format Conversions,
| | 01:25 | we could convert it into DVCPro HD.
| | 01:29 | The benefit to DVCPro HD is it's a very easy format to edit.
It can be edited on even slower computers like G5s,
| | 01:35 | even G4s could edit DVCPro HD.
| | 01:38 | But with the release of ProRes, the quality of ProRes is so
much higher than the quality of DVCPro HD- DVCPro HD is 8-bit,
| | 01:46 | and ProRes is 10-bit. DVCPro HD is not a square
pixel and ProRes is. My recommendation is that you
| | 01:53 | consider moving your files from their uncompressed state
into ProRes. Now because this was done inside AfterEffects,
| | 02:01 | I want to make sure that I select a ProRes progressive
version and here I do want to keep the high quality because
| | 02:08 | the quality was there to begin with. It wasn't an HDV, but
it is when I start with something which is natively done in
| | 02:14 | AfterEffects and they give it to me as a TIF sequence.
| | 02:17 | So I grab this and I drag it over
| | 02:19 | and it says there's Apple ProRes for Progressive
| | 02:22 | and we'll change the source by Control-clicking on
the word Source and set the destination to the desktop.
| | 02:27 | And you could change the filename, but for right now it's fine.
Click the Submit button and it automatically goes off.
| | 02:32 | Let's leave that embers transcoding.
Click Submit. It's going to create this file.
| | 02:37 | And because this computer's fast enough, it doesn't take
very long to create the file. Now remember our source file was
| | 02:43 | 210 MB in size. Let's hide Compressor. Double-click this
movie and open it up and notice that now we're in ProRes.
| | 02:52 | Our file size is 26 MB, almost but not quite 90% smaller.
| | 02:59 | And our data rate, instead of being 700 Mb a second is 87 Mb
a second. This can easily be handled on even a single hard drive.
| | 03:09 | I'd recommend a RAID. ProRes likes RAIDs better than they
do single hard drives, but even if you had just a single drive
| | 03:14 | for your media file, this ProRes would fit it.
| | 03:18 | So we can take smaller files like HDV and scale
them up. We can take big files and scale them down.
| | 03:24 | But there's one more transcode that I want to talk
about and that's what happens when you take an HD file
| | 03:28 | and you move it to SD to put onto a DVD for release.
| | 03:32 | Again, we've got multiple options.
| | 03:35 | We'll talk about those
| | 03:36 | next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Downconverting in FCP| 00:01 | Another common kind of transcode is converting high definition
down to standard definition and there's a couple different ways
| | 00:07 | we can do this and I'll illustrate both of them. For instance
here I have an HDV clip, a high def clip. It's 1080i.
| | 00:14 | And you can see that we've got a 16x9 aspect ratio when I
load it up here inside Final Cut, but my sequence, if I select
| | 00:19 | the sequence, and go to Sequence Settings, notice it's a DV.
So if I drop an HDV clip into DV, we get the dialog.
| | 00:26 | In this case I do not want to change
the sequence settings, instead I want to
| | 00:31 | squeeze my HDV clip into a DV sequence. Notice that it's
automatically letterboxed. It's actually more than just
| | 00:38 | letterboxed. When I double-click the clip to load
it up into the Viewer and click the Motion tab,
| | 00:42 | the image has been scaled to 50% size. Well.
| | 00:46 | If I grab this scaling, one of the advantages of moving HD
into a DV sequence is I've got pan and scan control in a
| | 00:53 | way that I never had before. If I want to reframe Katie,
I simply click on my center crosshair and I can put her over
| | 01:00 | on this side of the frame or that side of the frame or higher
or lower. Or I can take a wide shot, what was a wide shot,
| | 01:06 | and make it a close up. Again as long as you don't
go past 100% size, they'll be no image degradation.
| | 01:13 | So the advantage of capturing HDV and dropping it into
a Final Cut Timeline is if I have to re-frame shots,
| | 01:20 | it's easy to take an HD image and reframe it
| | 01:25 | simply by moving it up into the Motion tab and changing
the scale, as long as scale does not go greater than 100%.
| | 01:31 | Then when we're trying to render an output, it's going to
render an output that's high def picture, as a standard def image.
| | 01:37 | So if you know that you got a lot of image manipulation in
terms of repositioning or zooming that you want to do,
| | 01:43 | then I would say capture at high resolution, create your
sequence at lower resolution. Now the best lower resolution
| | 01:50 | to use would be uncompressed 10 -bit.
| | 01:53 | This is the equivalent of digi-beta. This gives you the best
possible space in which to do your effects and compositing.
| | 01:59 | Dropping it down to DV significantly decreases the quality.
All you're really gaining is file size and you would set that
| | 02:06 | as usual by going up to Easy Setup and if you want to
set it to DV, then you'd set it to DV or you've set it to-
| | 02:12 | let's just change this here.
| | 02:15 | NTSC, limit the number of things that we see. An DV NTSC
or DV NTSC 16x9. Uncompressed 10-bit, this is the highest
| | 02:24 | quality that you can get, Uncompressed 10-bit,
and still stay in a standard def space.
| | 02:30 | So if we did this, Uncompressed 10-bit.
Create a new project, Command+N.
| | 02:35 | Double click and load our Katie clip down into it.
| | 02:43 | Don't change the settings,
| | 02:44 | double click, click on the Motion Tab.
| | 02:47 | Scale it up to be whatever you want and then when you edit it,
you'll now be able to reframe and all the rest of it.
| | 02:53 | So there's lots of benefits to working this way, but there's
another way that we can work and that is to stay native HDV
| | 02:59 | the entire time. If you don't expect to have to reframe a shot,
why down convert this early? Let's edit it all the way through
| | 03:06 | as a high definition clip, say DVCPro HD or ProRes. The
advantage is at some point, the world is going to move to HD.
| | 03:14 | At some point we're going to have the ability to actually put
our titles onto a high-definition DVD and, can I even suggest this
| | 03:21 | in polite company, make money on it. Yes! It is possible. So
what we want to do is I don't want to edit this thing twice.
| | 03:28 | I don't want to edit a standard def version and edit a high def
version. I want to edit a high def version and then convert
| | 03:34 | everything at the end down to standard def DVD. So we've
seen one way is to create our sequence and edit standard def.
| | 03:42 | This make sense if you don't expect to
have anything to sell in high def later.
| | 03:45 | There's no evergreen value. You're doing medical
training or some other industrial or high-tech training,
| | 03:50 | which is going to totally change in three months.
There's no reason that hang onto a high def version,
| | 03:55 | but if you're doing something like narrative fiction,
which has no shelf life, it's just going to last forever,
| | 04:00 | then shoot in HD, edit in HD, output
in HD and downconvert at that time.
| | 04:06 | That's the second way we can work and I'll show you that
| | 04:09 | in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Downconverting using Compressor| 00:01 | The second way that we can downconvert is to edit our entire
project as high-definition output and bring that final movie
| | 00:07 | into Compressor and let Compressor create a standard def version
of it. The advantage to this is that what we can shoot HD,
| | 00:14 | edit HD, output HD and now we've got a
master of our show in high definition.
| | 00:20 | We can then create a high definition distribution master,
we can create a standard def DVD, we can even take it to the
| | 00:25 | web and make it smaller yet, but we've only had to edit it once.
| | 00:29 | Now there's a lot of advantages to that. It doesn't give us
the repositioning that we had when we repositioned into a DV
| | 00:34 | sequence, but you know there's lots of different options.
You get to pick the one that's best for you. We've spent a lot of
| | 00:39 | time looking at Katie so let's look at something else this
time. And let's open up our ProRes clips and let's load the
| | 00:45 | shorebird into our source image. And we can see our little
bird is marching around in there and this time we're going to
| | 00:53 | downconvert and we're going to create an
MPEG-2 file. When you're creating high def DVDs,
| | 00:59 | H.264 is to format to use. When you're creating
standard def DVDs, MPEG-2 is the format to use.
| | 01:06 | So we twirl down Apple, we find the DVD selection
| | 01:11 | and we're going to select best quality and what you do
is you select the best quality that's equal to or greater
| | 01:18 | than the length if your video.
| | 01:19 | Our shorebird here runs 20 seconds so 90 minutes is
greater than or equal to our video. I grab the entire folder,
| | 01:27 | drag the folder on. It creates an audio compression
format and a video compression format. When I select this,
| | 01:33 | this gives me all the different settings of my MPEG-2.
| | 01:36 | MPEG-2 is the standard compression for a standard def DVD
and when we click on the Inspector to make changes,
| | 01:42 | click on Quality. I tend to think these numbers are just a
little bit on the high side. I set it to 5.5 and 7.2 for
| | 01:51 | my compression. It gives me about 90 minutes of video.
| | 01:54 | And I think it looks very good. The rest of the
settings are OK. So we'll just leave those as they are.
| | 02:00 | The next thing that I want to do is notice
the frame controls are automatically turned on.
| | 02:06 | If you want to change this- and I want
to mention deinterlacing for just a minute.
| | 02:10 | The way that we unlock these files is we click the Unlock
button, which is this button over here and then we're able
| | 02:16 | to change these settings.
| | 02:18 | What deinterlacing does can best be illustrated by this
picture right here. This is the bird that I compressed
| | 02:23 | a little bit earlier.
| | 02:24 | And notice that suddenly it's got four legs.
| | 02:27 | Most people would agree that most shore birds do not have
four legs. They only have two. And that's because this was shot
| | 02:35 | on an interlaced format and interlaced means
that half the lines are shot at one instant and then
| | 02:40 | a 60th or 50th of a second later,
the other half of the lines are shot.
| | 02:45 | So when you watch this on a computer,
which is a progressive device,
| | 02:49 | you're going to see the interlaced lines.
| | 02:51 | There's only two ways to get rid of them. One is don't
shoot interlaced in the first place, shoot progressive.
| | 02:57 | Or you have to remove the lines.
| | 02:59 | If you remove the lines, your image quality
is almost always going to decrease,
| | 03:04 | but the amount of the image quality decrease depends upon how
you remove the lines. If you simply grab half of them and
| | 03:11 | drag them out so they're gone and duplicate the remaining
lines, because remember still has to be 1920x1080.
| | 03:16 | You can't just make them disappear. You've got
to replace them with something. That's the fastest.
| | 03:21 | The problem with it is that it your image quality is just going to
sacrifice, it's going to suffer. Well we can change that over here.
| | 03:28 | When we go to Deinterlacing. What Fast (line averaging) does is
it's fastest way to deinterlace, but you don't have much quality.
| | 03:35 | It makes things look a little soft.
| | 03:38 | So I was doing a test and I selected Best. This piece of
bird footage, which runs about 20 seconds, when Deinterlace
| | 03:45 | was set to Fast took about 48 seconds to compress.
When all the settings were exactly the same and I set
| | 03:53 | Deinterlace to Best, it was at 12 minutes
and it had only done 2% of the video.
| | 03:59 | So clearly,
| | 04:00 | it's improving the quality but thr time it takes has
substantially increased. The general recommendation is
| | 04:07 | to set this to Better, because when
you set it to Better your going to get
| | 04:11 | a much better quality deinterlacing without
taking the incredible amount times that Best does.
| | 04:16 | By the way, it's just kind of an
'oh by the way' kind of heads up,
| | 04:20 | don't ever set all of these to Best at the same time. Apple
says that when all of those are set to Best at the same time,
| | 04:28 | compression takes weeks of time.
| | 04:31 | I think that's a little on the slow side for even the
most patient of us. Generally Better, Better, and Better
| | 04:38 | or Fast, Fast and Better are good combinations.
The rest of the settings are fine.
| | 04:43 | You need to decide if you want to deinterlace.
| | 04:45 | If your image is going to be seen on a TV set, leave it
interlaced. If it's going to be seen on the web or just on
| | 04:51 | the computer screen, then deinterlacing may make sense but your
mileage may vary. Do a test on something short and decide by
| | 04:59 | looking at it on a system that's where most of your viewers
are going to watch it. OK. Once we're done, we click Submit.
| | 05:06 | File name's going to be duplicated. I'll just take
out the word 2-pass here. Submit. Go for it and...
| | 05:12 | it's compressing. This'll take about a minute. We'll do a
flash to white. I'll come back and I'll show you the results.
| | 05:18 | So here is our shore bird footage
| | 05:20 | and notice the interlacing that we've seen and what
I want to show you is the version we compressed
| | 05:24 | with deinterlacing set to Better. So I double click that.
I'll put it on first frame here so we can match it. Double click.
| | 05:31 | Look at the difference.
| | 05:34 | Look at the quality difference. We see
a much greater quality and when we pause,
| | 05:40 | the lines have been blended together.
| | 05:42 | Here.
| | 05:48 | Clearly a difference in terms of how interlacing looks because
the animal's got four feet here and here it's only got two.
| | 05:55 | However, there's a trade-off. The fastest
deinterlace took 48 seconds to compress.
| | 06:01 | This took four minutes and 10 seconds, so it takes a lot longer.
| | 06:05 | But just look at the difference in the quality of the image.
| | 06:08 | And again we tried to set Deinterlace to Best and it was going
to take the rest of my adult life. So Better actually gives us
| | 06:15 | some really good looks when we are downconverting from high
def down to standard def. Lots of things to experiment with and
| | 06:23 | you can change your own settings. But transcoding, when you do it
through Compressor, I think you'll be really pleased with results.
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ConclusionWhat we've covered| 00:01 | Whew, man. This is been a lot of stuff
to cover and a lot of technology.
| | 00:06 | We began by defining high definition terms and how it all fits
into this technology that's changing on almost a minute by
| | 00:12 | minute basis. Because you understand what the terms mean,
you going to be able make much more informed decisions
| | 00:18 | and thinking of deciding.
| | 00:20 | We then talked about what acquisition format to use.
| | 00:23 | Because in high definition, the format that we
shoot is almost never the format that we distribute,
| | 00:29 | so you want make sure that you pick the best shooting
format that ties in with the actual distribution format.
| | 00:34 | We talked about the hardware requirements for Final Cut Studio,
relatively simple, and the special hardware needed for HD.
| | 00:41 | Relatively not simple. We then showcased different workflows
for transcoding and for high definition and a brief discussion
| | 00:48 | on how to achieve a film look for your video. Finally, after
all that preamble, we got into Final Cut Pro and showed how
| | 00:54 | we can get high-definition into Final Cut, whether it's
HDV or DVC Pro HD or XT CAM or pro-res or uncompressed,
| | 01:02 | whatever it is, Final Cut Pro can handle it.
| | 01:05 | The key is simply how do you get in there in the first place.
| | 01:08 | Then we looked at ways of improving our editing and our rendering
in terms of making sure we don't have stuff bogged down,
| | 01:14 | because these files are just so big and not just big in
terms of file size, but in terms of pixels that have to be
| | 01:20 | manipulated. Then we give you a quick summary of how to
output, export and output our files and wrapped up with
| | 01:26 | a discussion of transcoding.
| | 01:27 | HD is a never ending series of changes
and the technology continues to evolve.
| | 01:33 | But I hope I've given you the skills that you need to
start to experiment successfully with HD on your own and
| | 01:39 | be able to do more with it in the future.
| | 01:42 | My name's Larry Jordan.
| | 01:44 | Thanks for watching!
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