Hardware for 16mm short on DVD

[Guest kirkland]

Hi all,

Been following the forum for quite a while now, only hope to someday wax techie and dish out the kind of advice and tips I see on this board.

 

Ok here's the scoop:

 

Shot 16mm Ilford (amazing in low light btw, bulletproof negs, push 2 stops without fear), preparing to telecine. Options of course are miniDV, DigiBeta, and uncompressed Quicktime. I want to handle all the footage on my PC, editing on Avid most likely, while retaining as much quality as possible for the eventual burn to DVD.

 

Should I purchase the Mojo, or whatever other software to handle uncompressed? Even if the Telecine techs give me the Quicktime, Avid can't handle that right? I wouldn't be able to watch the uncompressed footage, but could I downconvert to a lower res format for editing and match back to the uncompressed footage all on my PC?

What file format should I go with?

 

Capture from DigiBeta, is that a possibility?

 

Should I just go with miniDV, won't that be kinda shabby?

 

Thanks for the time.

 

B) Tomasz

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Why would you want to use Avid? Almost anything's better. Premiere will online uncompressed quicktimes for you without too much hassle.

 

Capturing from Digibeta requires an SDI input board; not that expensive, but ensure it's got drivers for whatever software you like (this may force you back to Avid) plus storage capable of sustaining uncompressed data rates. This isn't actually that hard these days - most inbuilt RAID controllers will happily do at least single stream uncompressed SD without a murmur.

 

DV won't look quite as good. If you can get it transferred to Quicktime data, I say go with that; it doesn't require expensive equipment to handle it. Better, go for uncompressed AVI data; the processing overhead is much less.

 

Phil

[Guest kirkland]

Phil,

 

Thanks for responding, I now realize this question has been going around, but after spending an hour reading all the posts, I'm still scratching my head.

 

Why Avid (now we're talking software, xpress pro - pc i hope)? The phrase 'industry standard' may yet prove to be the greatest marketing ploy ever...

 

Premiere will handle uncompressed quicktimes? Really? Or is there some major compression from AVI I'm missing? Also, Premiere is one hella easy program to use.

 

Considering two options now:

1. offline a dv copy, then conform back to Digibeta - but... how costly is the online session and still - how do I get a file to burn dvds from?

 

2. find a way to capture to a different file format other than quicktime, but then can my system handle it? i dunnojackbout RAID, SDI, etc. Naively I thought, "surely we live in the 21st century, and surely a nice pc can make me movies!"

 

Aside, if I have some huge file, uncompressed, that I can't watch on my pc, can I make a low res copy and create an edit list via timecode, then cutup the original uncompressed file and render all on premiere, avid, or whatever NLE software have ya'

 

Thanks again,

 

Tomasz

 

P.S. How do I 'Enable emotions' under Post Options? :lol:

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> Why Avid ... 'industry standard' ... marketing ploy

 

Quite.

 

> Premiere will handle uncompressed quicktimes? Really? Or is there some major

> compression from AVI I'm missing?

 

Premiere will handle uncompressed Quicktime, AVI, TIFF sequences, you name it. Formats like Quicktime and AVI are just wrappers - you can get different codecs for them to allow various kinds of data. Just select "none" for compressor and it's uncompressed. It's entirely possible to handle an uncompressed 2K sequence for filmout in Premiere.

 

> how costly is the online session

 

Fairly, especially considering that Premiere isn't that good at EDL export - at least, versions up to 6.5 weren't. It's workable but you have to know what you're doing. Going this path would be almost the only situation where using Avid would be a good idea. Liaise with the online place in any case - they probably can take a Premiere EDL, they probably just don't know they can.

 

> how do I get a file to burn dvds from?

 

Find a transfer place to do it for you. Most video facilities places can do data ops these days.

 

> I have some huge file, uncompressed, that I can't watch on my pc...

 

There's no reason you shouldn't be able to watch it on your PC if you have some reasonably fast storage. If you don't, it'll drop frames, but it may still be watchable. Remember - uncompressed is actually EASIER to play back, processing-time-wise. The only thing is that if you want to watch it on a video monitor, so you can do some grading or whatever on an accurate colour display, you may need to render it down to DV so you can view it via firewire or whatever.

 

> can I make a low res copy and create an edit list via timecode, then cutup the

> original uncompressed file and render...

 

Yes, that would be a perfectly sensible way to proceed.

 

Phil