Getting into true 24p from HV20 / 30 Footage

The most important thing to know about HDV and the Canon HV20 HD camcorder to get your money’s worth is that the 24p footage is wrapped in a 60i wrapper. It is possible to get true HD progressive 24 frame per second footage out of your hv20 but the “how” is the focus of this article.

Ultimately you have to ask yourself – what is the final destination for your footage? Sure we would all like to believe that our video of our kids wading in the Mr. Turtle pool will end up at Sundance one day, but is it really something you are going to follow through?

Have you considered that creating a DI or “digital intermediate” may actual increase the size of your captured files by up to 150% +? have you budgeted for disc storage, backup storage and asset management of your captured and ideally, logged material?

Let’s assume it is.

Essentially you need to remove the pulldown introduced by the camera – this means you want to get it from 29.97 – which is an interlaced NTSC playback format to true progressive 24 fps. As usual at this site, I will not go into details about what drop vs. non-drop is or why we feel that 24fps looks aesthetically more pleasing than 30fps. There is a way to discover all of that *cough* Googlewikipediahv20forums.com etc. *cough*

Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro HDMI Editing Card with PCI Express

There are various methods for removing pulldown, that is, mathematically selecting frames to remove so as to get 24 frames per second from 30 frames per second, with varying results. On the PC there is an absolutely free method for doing this that requires a half hour of downloads and configuration, but once it is set up can reuse the chain without having to repeat all the setup steps. It works wonderfully, creates enormous files, much larger than what you begin with, and of all the methods I have seen, including Cineform‘s pulldown removal on capture and TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress, it looks the sharpest and is most likely to play with Vegas, Premiere and the other NLE’s without difficulty. The output WILL look weird however, if you try to play it back in Windows Media Player because it is an intermediate format, using Lagarith Lossless compression which is essentially a lossless codec into AVI files. I should also mention Blackmagic Design’s Intensity Pro card which allows you to capture (and monitor back out) directly through its full-size HDMI port. A beautiful and elegant solution, but it takes up one of your PCI-e card slots and again, I have heard varying reports in terms of happiness with the process. Incidentally, for $25 I bought a DVI to HDMI cable from a reseller on Amazon, connected it to the second port of my Nvidia 8800 GTS and am happy as can be (granted the processing is not done on a third-party card’s processors, so you take a small hit there).

The truth is, they are all good solutions and you may have a different experience using any of them with your setup. I recommend trying them all out before deciding what workflow you like best.

TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress is actually a terrific program, though I sometimes found it a little strange to navigate. It is very simple however, very versatile, allows batch processing and spits out very good looking video. A-B’ed on a 42″ Sony Bravia 1080P monitor, however, TMPENGC’s output of Lagarith AVI using the same settings as the Eugenia/HV20Forums process outlined above tended to be a little less deep in the blacks, and ever so slightly softer at the edges. The resultant files, however were about the same size as the files I fed it, unlike the free process which as I have mentioned ad nauseum spits out much larger files.

Being the quality freak that I am, and also a sucker for (relative) simplicity, I stuck with the Free Eugenia method. I have tried out Cineform HD a few times – this software solution sounds amazing on paper – realtime pulldown removal from your HDV camera during capture through a firewire cable! While I did get it going successfully a pair of times, the program crashed just as often. For the record, I am using it in windows Vista. Not because I am stupid, but because it should damn well work in Vista if its gunna.

So Mr. HD Emanuel Pereira came down to my studio here in Hollywood and took a look at the HV20 cam, its native output spit out of the HDMI port directly into the SOny Bravia’s HDMi port. we determined that the grayishness of the dark areas was actually not the fault of the Canon in low-light, but rather the tendency for HD LCD’s to suck at true black let alone ambiguous black areas.

With a huge sigh of relief, we proceeded to figure out what might be the best way to capture to the PC and check out some vectorscopes and histograms and what have you. This was not as straightforward as you might think. Vegas, my long-time favorite, actually may have the WORST capture solution of them all. I don’t know why. I love the Sonic Foundry-cum-Sony products, but the capture tool in Vegas just has a mind of its own and it blows.

We tried Windows Movie Maker. Fine, but not for making my movie.

Premiere Pro CS3 has the most pro solution of the three (discounting AVID HD which does not play at all with Windows Vista). I don’t love Premiere, but it’s getting better and the capture tool allows you to log, batch capture and other stuff that would probably seem most familiar to AVID, Final Cut and Mac users in general, as well as pro editors’ assistants (who usually do all the capture and logging).

What made Premier really happy for me was that Adobe released some Canon HV20-specific project templates for 24p in the cam’s native resolution. This tells me two things:

1. the 1440×1080 30P or 24P templates that were already built into Premiere WERE A PAIN to reconcile with what I was capturing.

2. Adobe respects the HV20 enough to have bothered.

Anyway, this site is about the Canon HV20 and what it can do and the bottom line is, having captured footage in, removed pulldown and previewed the resultant full HD 1920×1080 24p footage, Mr. Pereira was duly impressed and quite certain that the camera could serve to shoot a proper HD film that can safely be transferred to film for theatrical presentation.

I return now to my initial challenge to you, the reader: you can rest assured that the Canon HV20 can provide you with full pro material, but you have to then decide when and why you might want to create it. I read an article in the Hollywood reporter concerning the age of the Tapeless Post Facility, and quite frankly there is a gap between massive storage and archival solutions available and the sheer amount of data that a Thomson Viper or Red camera can spit out. Sure, you can capture it – but can you afford to deal with it?

Here is a another challenge – first try using your HV20 or comparable HDV cam to create a three minute video so you can see what kind of data and overhead you are dealing with, and then post it to YouTube so that it looks just as pristine. It is a lot harder than you think. YouTube has recently raised it upload quote per file from 100mb to 1gig, and they are definitely preparing to unveil their new widescreen aspect ratio for content, but even so, figuring out the very best way to render our your HD material so that it maintains all its beauty is a tough racket. There is, in my experience no sure-fire magic bullet solution for this. There are copious sites and guides that promise them, but I have tried them all with varying results. Things changed based on what you are showcasing, how light or dark it is, how well it is shot and lit, how much movement there is, and very important, how good it SOUNDS. Play around with that experiment first and then you are better prepared to tackle managing a true HD project and deciding whether or not you really want to spend your summer cutting that short of your kids by the pool for the next Sundance submissions deadline.

On a final note, I will be at the NAB conference in Vegas this week and will be checking in with all of the above companies to ask them questions about workflow, optimization, and what is on the horizon for them. I look forward to sharing my discoveries with you.