HD and HDV Research
I’m preparing myself for the next wave of video production. I decided that it’s not worth my while to invest in any new hardware/software that is not capable of handling HD. While there is still going to be a while before most people can view an HD image on their home TV, I want to make sure I don’t have to buy all new gear when I want to make an indie film with the potential for a film-out or HD projection in a theater.
The first step is to see what’s out there. I’m lucky to live in Manhattan. There are always product demos and seminars coming through town. This week I attended an HDV seminar put on by VASST and Sony, and a Matrox/Adobe demo of the AXIO HD solution.
The folks at VASST were very helpful in explaining the nuts and bolts of dealing with HDV footage. They demonstrated everything with Sony Vegas, which seemed to be a very robust solution for editing. I’ve played around with Vegas, but don’t have much incentive for learning another edit suite. Douglas Spotted Eagle did the presentation and really knows HDV and Vegas. His book on HDV is an excellent resource.
VASST has also created a number of very useful plugins for Vegas. Their Gearshift software is essential if you want to downconvert your HDV to SD for editing.
Mannie and Spot were very helpful and knowledgable. They spent a great deal of time answering questions on breaks and after the session. Thanks.
Earlier this spring I attended an Adobe HDV seminar. They demonstrated the Adobe Video Collection software. In addition to explaining the workflows of HDV in the Adobe software, they gave a number of very helpful tips and techniques for navigating this amazing collection of software. They didn’t need to sell me – I recently upgraded to the Pro Suite. They just made me even more glad that I bought the software.
The demo that I attended today was focused on the Matrox AXIO HD solution that uses the Adobe Video Collection as the software to drive the Matrox hardware. This system is rock solid. They showed some tricky footage and the images were pristine – no color banding or video noise. The performance was also excellent – no latency in the timelines or when tweaking effects settings. Watching 2 streams of uncompressed HD running with effects and 2 layers of graphics was impressive.
The AXIO HD solution is intended to be a turnkey solution, so Matrox doesn’t sell the hardware seperately. You’ve got to work with an integrater to build the system and they only use HP PC’s. This is not a do-it-yourselfer’s system. And, it’s not cheap (it’s also not the most expensive solution by a longshot either.)
The AXIO system can be purchased in an SD version which can later be upgraded to HD. The only change is the Breakout Box (BOB.) One downside is that you have to chose between the HD or SD BOB – you can’t have both at the same time. Another thing that I asked them to put on the wish list was to include HD down conversion with the SD version so that users could take advantage of HDV before they were ready to trade up and buy new decks and monitors. Since the processing cards are the same for both versions, it should be possible to take advantage of the HD processing power without having to buy the more expensive BOB and it’s SDI connectors. Avid is doing this with it’s Express HD + Mojo solution (I just don’t like the rest of the software in their production suite. They just don’t compare to having Photoshop, Encore, After Effects and Audition. I need a very compelling reason to give up the tight integration of those applications with the Premiere Pro NLE.)
The Matrox and Adobe reps were also very helpful and knowledgable. They took the time to listen to my needs and were honest about the capabilities of their system.
I still haven’t made up my mind about what the best solution for an HD suite is. I’d like to try out one of the Black Magic Designs HD cards in conjunction with the Adobe Video Collection. Their top card handles 4:4:4 uncompressed HD i/o with the ability to downconvert to SD for display (and monitor the HD and SD feeds at the same time.) If the performance of this solution is anywhere near the AXIO HD – my next system will be a 64bit Dual Core PC with the Black Magic card and the Adobe Video Collection. I’ll take the money I saved and buy an HD monitor and a few Terabytes of storage.
