Hot on the heels of the recent release of Sony ’s new consumer HDR-FX1 HDV camcorder , and the announcement of the pro-featured Sony HVR-Z1U HDV camcorder , software allowing the capture of their footage is set for release. One of the first out of the gate works with Sony Vegas 5. DMN’s Charlie White traveled to Sony ’s Madison, Wisconsin offices to get a first look at this soon-to-ship applet, and talked with Sony software engineering gurus about the new camcorders and their interaction with Sony Vegas software. On the minds of all: In which direction is the revolutionary HDV format headed?

The goal of Sony Vegas staffers circa late November, 2004 – one that’s been stated by many in the digital video industry – is to bring to high definition production the same workflow to which we’ve become accustomed using the user-friendly DV format. Beyond that, Vegas developers want to allow users to edit HD footage on a minimal system, even a notebook . To illustrate that point, Sony ’s Director of Engineering for Media Software Dave Hill showed how Sony Vegas can manipulate HD files on a computer that was decidedly ordinary, a 2.2GHz P4 machine that was probably quite remarkable about three years ago.  

The process begins with a capture tool designed by CineForm. That’s the company that last year stunned the digital video world with its AspectHD, a software codec that allowed users to edit 720p/30 HDTV footage, previewing dissolves and effects in real time on a garden-variety computer. Now CineForm has developed an applet called ConnectHD that’s able to work with the higher-resolution 1080i/60 format used in Sony ’s new camcorders . It allows you to effortlessly move footage from camcorder to hard drive, converting the frames to the CineForm codec on the way. This facilitates faster response on the timeline, because with the exception of Pinnacle with its Liquid Edition software, editing software developers including Sony haven’t developed their own real-time method for editing native long-GOP MPEG-2 on the timeline. Nevertheless, CineForm’s codec accomplishes this feat very well. And Sony has been working with CineForm, tweaking CineForm’s ConnectHD product for optimum performance with Vegas . The software, which will be offered for download in the next few days on the Sony Vegas Web site (and a Beta version is currently available for download from CineForm’s site located at http://www.cineform.com/products/DownloadCHDBetaDone.htm), is obviously an early version of a capture tool for the HDV format, with no presets and bare bones choices (see graphic below).

Sony told Digital Media Net we can expect more sophisticated capture tools in the future. Said Sony ’s Dave Hill, “We will have a Vegas update that has some render templates, project settings, media profiles and more, to make it an easier experience.” But for now, Sony is offering a system where you can achieve a DV-like workflow with high definition footage. “You plug the thing in just like DV and you can capture native MPEG right off the camera and edit that,” said Dave Hill. “You can capture to CineForm’s intermediate CineForm codec for vastly improved performance, or you can capture both MPEG-2 and CineForm and swap them out,” he continued. But given the high quality and fast response of the CineForm codec, Hill saw little reason to use the MPEG-2 transport stream that is native to Sony ’s HDV format. “I personally have yet to see a case where I bothered to swap CineForm and MPEG-2 out. Maybe there is one, but I don’t see any reason to do it. Now there are purists who don’t want to convert to an intermediate codec, but those often are the guys who are doing uncompressed DV. If it’s good, you don’t have to worry about it. That’s what we’re focusing on,” Hill said.  

In the meantime, the performance of this CineForm/ Vegas applet was impressive. When Hill loaded up a few clips and demonstrated the real time response on the Vegas timeline, it was notable the way the software and decidedly mediocre hardware was still able to allow usable previews of effects using the HDV footage. For example, a dissolve between two clips displayed a frame rate of around 10 frames per second, while a text key placed over those two dissolving clips brought the playback to a much slower frame rate. But keep in mind, this was a 2.2GHz P4 machine at work. In New York two weeks ago at the rollout of Sony ’s pro-level HDV camcorder , a faster computer was able to show even more real time response – full frame rate cuts and dissolves were possible on the more up-to-date machine used in the demo there.

Not only was the timeline performance sprightly even on that decrepit machine, the quality of this CineForm codec was quite good. Only under the closest observation could any wavelet compression artifacts be seen. Then a DMN reporter asked about the requirements to export this footage back out to tape or to a usable file format such as Windows Media 9, and Hill showed how footage must be rendered after all the edit decisions were made. Our 30-second example production, with three dissolves and a text key, took slightly more than two minutes to render to a Windows Media 9 file, using the P4 2.2GHz machine. Hill mentioned that the best is yet to come with the codec and its underlying editing software as well. “It’ll automatically get faster next year without anybody doing anything. Irrespective of processor speed growth, I think there will be a lot of optimizations in the various apps,” Hill said. 

One technological anomaly with this system is the fact that at this point there’s not a ubiquitous medium such as DVD onto which the HDV format final products can be distributed. Even so, the Sony Vegas team emphasizes existing media that can be used now, until advanced DVD formats such as Blu-ray and HD DVD become practical and widespread by this time next year. Hill said, “Right now, we think that the ideal delivery for high def is either for projection or for some kind of Web delivery over a corporate network. Actually, both of those fit nicely with Windows Media – the space is small, and it looks good.” Sony also demonstrated the strength of using HDV for standard definition production, using a DVE effect to zoom in on a section of the screen without losing any quality, a powerful ability when down-rezzing from high definition to standard definition.

Now that the new 1080i Sony HDV camcorder has finally made its way to the streets, all the usual suspects of the editing software arena are weighing in with their capture tools, all of which are primitive compared to their mature DV counterparts. But the appeal of this new system is its ability to mimic the DV routine, slowly at first, but soon to gather momentum in the near future. As the software is improved, and the hardware accelerators join the fray, HDV will soon show that DV’s past is yet a prologue to the new world of HDTV for everyone.

FONTE:digitalproducer.com