David Battistella ©Copyright 2005 David Batistes and Creativecow.net. All Rights Reserved

RECAPTURING HDV- Can it be done?


Well, I was very curious. So many posts ... so much talked about with the HDV format. One of the most common things I heard was that because HDV was in the long GOP format it could not be successfully recaptured when having to online the footage. “This is because there is no TC accuracy”, I would often hear. I actually am guilty of it in many posts here on the COW myself. So I set up a test to prove myself right, or wrong.

While I was at it, I tested a couple of workflows, too.

First off, I want to thank Terry Stein of the DV shop in Toronto for helping me with the tests and providing the deck. We did the test at his store where he has a DeckLink HD card with a Multibridge. I also took the media back to my studio to look at it all through the KONA 2 card.

Here is the disclaimer portion of the article. I did these tests independently on a short project using the following system configuration:




Final cut Pro version 5.0.2



The Sony HDV XXX deck




The opinions about picture quality, etc., are eyeball tests and are strictly opinion on what “looks” better. No multi generational testing was performed.

So, this is the little project we started with and here is the finished movie (a smaller version of it of course). I tried for various shot durations, series of cuts, etc., to emulate what I could for a larger type online. 

Please note that we were just using random shots captured by the camera.  We were not trying to execute any kind of idea with this movie as it was strictly a test. The shots are of various artifacts around Terry's store and he shoots in different lighting conditions to see what the camera can do.

The night shots were good for exposing grain and pixel blocking. All of the footage was shot using the SONY HDRFX1 camera.




Once the footage was captured and cut, we went into online mode, using the media manager (believe it or not, it actually does work) I created an offline sequence for recapture.




Now many people have also said that media manager is broken in FCP 5.0, but as fellow grazer Michael Alberts pointed out to me: the media manager does not really work properly when the media is offline. If the media you are trying to create the offline for is offline, then the media manager will not trim properly. So make sure you create your offline with the project online. In this case the media manger worked really well.

and poof!!! Here are the two projects before media manager:





and after:

For the first test, we had the deck recapture everything via the firewire stream. This is how HDV was designed so this was also a worst case scenario test, in that if you lost your media and had to recapture it, you could.
I selected the sequence hit batch capture and started feeding FCP the tapes it was asking me for. When we were all done we went to the timelines.

First I played back the original sequence from the original test. Then I played back the recaptured sequence as a comparison. They were SPOT ON! I was a bit taken aback. I had heard so many stories of slippage, dropped frames, on and on. Was it true? Only one way to find out. I started to copy TC from the original sequence and paste it into the new sequence. This is a beautiful way to compare frames in FCP and I do it all the time when I am comparing online and offline footage.

Here's how you do it.

Copy this TC value




Switch to the other sequence and paste it in there. Now just by flipping tabs you can see if you are in sync. Not quite as easy in AVID.

Now, I didn't do a frame by frame test but I checked about 20 frames at different sections and on different shots and they all were SPOT ON!! Imagine my shock and amazement.

So the myth was debunked and I had proved myself wrong! That is so satisfying! So the HDV was successfully recaptured via the firewire stream.

What if I wanted to recapture it using the DVCPROHD codec. Maybe that codec is a better color space for this online? Maybe I could do more effects with my KONA card? Maybe I would get more RT if I did that?

Following the same media manager steps, I created an offline sequence for the DVCPROHD codec and I captured that.

Gasp! I know some of you are saying, “how can that be, you can't do that via the firewire stream.” You are all right, you can't. This is where the DeckLink Multibridge comes in.

We took the analog outputs of the HDV deck the Multibridge and used it as out capture device. Then we realized that the HDV deck does not have an RS-422 deck control. At this point we though we were beat because when I selected HDV as the deck control it would not show up. Then I tried to switch to a regular firewire device control.




Neat trick, eh? This allowed us to capture the HDV source to any codec we wanted WITH DECK CONTROL. So we did two more tests. One with the DVCPRO HD codec and then we captured some 10-BIT uncompressed footage with the same workflow. WOW! An offline online solution for HDV.

There are a few oddities to report. One would assume that the 10-bit uncompressed footage would actually look better on screen than the HDV codec but this was not the case. The footage that we capture to the DVCPRO HD codec and to Uncompressed 10-bit was noticeably, visually “softer” than when viewing the native HDV.