Editing with Adobe Premiere Pro
Users of the Windows-only version of Adobe Premiere – Premiere Pro - have a number of possibilities for capturing and editing HDV. CineForm’s Aspect HD Pro 2.5 plug-in allows the capture and editing of HDV from the Sony HDR-FX1E camcorder, with some real-time capabilities.In addition, CineForm offers the Connect HD plug-in for Sony Vegas 5.0d but we didn’t have either CineForm variant available when writing this review. Adobe has also licensed portions of CineForm’s technology, and says it will be providing its own plug-in with HDV support in the near future.
And, MainConcept has updated its MPEG Pro plug-in for Premiere Pro to add support for the Sony FX1E. This is said to include capture to native transport or program stream, scene-detection (program stream only) and playback to tape of program-stream or transport-stream files. Batch capture is also provided.
MainConcept’s offering was running with Premiere, Vegas and the two CineForm plug-ins on the DVC-built PC we had at VideoForum. But we had no time to properly assess any of them, so that’s something else we’ll need to do for you soon.
What will surprise many is that, at present, Matrox’s Axio system (yup, Windows) doesn’t support HDV, so isn’t an option for the well-heeled semi-pro looking for more responsive editing. Matrox, though, is planning support for a ‘future release’.
Since each frame of 1,080i HDV is nearly four times the resolution of DV, it’s really not surprising that creating editing solutions, especially real-time solutions, is problematic, and that what is initially available offers far less than current DV editors. Each HD stream is like mixing four DV streams at once, and MPEG-2 itself adds a layer of complexity, as well, because it stores footage in a series of groups of pictures (GOPs). Each GOP must be loaded into memory for any frame within it to be edited.
As computers continue to increase in power (though Moore’s Law seemed to have taken a holiday for a while), the number of streams that can be edited in real time will increase. And video editing, which is one area that can take serious advantage of increased processor power, will benefit from the move towards having two CPUs on a single chip, and of PCs being fitted with multiple CPUs chips. Naturally, we plan to keep you updated on new developments on the CPU front, and on HDV-ready editing software, hardware and PC systems.
If you’re not a broadcaster or production company or just hugely rich, currently the most satisfactory way of editing the FX1’s footage – comparable with DV, but not as fluid or with as many streams of video as we’ve got used to - is to work with high-resolution AVIs produced in real-time when capturing. And even that needs a very powerful PC, with lots of Ram and fast hard disk drives, and ideally, a hardware solution such as Canopus's Edius NX for HDV
However, there is an alternative, hopefully on the near horizon, that will restore the speed of editing to something closer to what we’ve got used to with DV. This would use proxy DV AVIs in place of HDV or high-res AVIs during editing, and only bring in HDV or high-res AVIs to replace the DV AVIs when the edit was finished.
This isn’t a fanciful notion. Pinnacle’s budget editor Studio has done something similar for years. It can create low-res M-JPEG proxy files that allow editing of DV on computers that don’t have sufficient free hard disk space to store at one time all the DV footage that a project might require. However, the proxy files used in Studio offer no external monitoring, but this would not be case if using DV as a proxy for HDV.
With HDV, the proxy method depends on the FX1E being able to output HDV footage as DV on the fly – which it can do – and in having software that not only supports the proxy way but is also able to frame-accurately capture from the camcorder, and that’s still not available. A further complication comes from the way, seemingly, HDV’s timecode is stored within the long-GOP structure, something that might mean its necessary to pull in the HDV footage not from the camcorder but from hard disk. But all this is up in the air right now.
Oh, and for the record, when we checked out the FX1’s ability to convert to DV on the fly we thought that the results of this real-time conversion were not quite as good as that done within editing programs. But, of course, the software conversion took very much longer than real time, so in some situations the trade off will likely be acceptable.