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Filed under: *VIDEO* •Cameras •Editing •Post Production •Production •

Recover 4:4:4 from Canon 7D’s live HDMI output

Early this morning, I was surprised with an e-mail from a bikini store from the Basque Country. For those who don’t know, the Basque Country is an Autonomous Community of northern Spain. They obviously knew that I don’t speak Euskera (Basque), so they wrote in perfect Castilian, and fortunately were not attempting to sell me a bikini (since being a man, I really don’t need one). They explained that they had experienced a great increase in volume in online sales of their bikinis. “Due to budget constraints”, they recently purchased a Canon 7D to create their new video catalog. They went on to say that they were considering a new Swedish process which apparently recovers the original 4:4:4 shot material from the Canon 7D’s live HDMI output, which only carries 4:2:2. I wasn’t familiar with that Swedish process, so I looked into it and found that —according to the developer, even though in live mode the Canon 7D currently outputs an uncompressed cropped image of 1620x910 (not full 1920x1080), that is indeed the “same crop as the 1080p compressed material on the camera’s memory card”, meaning that after upscaling, there is no resolution loss compared to what would have been recorded in the camera. Wow! That’s a lot of bad news, and a lot of good news in a single sentence!

Syndicate 7D Tool’s unusual requirements

Currently the Syndicate 7D Tools’ requirements include a Mac with Windows! Here goes:

• HDMI capture equipment (Syndicate currently recommends: a Mac running Final Cut Pro and a Matrox MXO2 Mini)
• Windows XP/Vista/7
• QuickTime 7.6 or later

This is all subject to change. There may eventually be a Mac version of Syndicate 7D Tools, so you wouldn’t need Windows. On the other hand, there may later be support for using Syndicate 7D Tools without a Mac, using a Adobe Premiere CS4 for Windows.

Price and more information

Currently, Syndicate 7D tool costs €199 (±US$287 at press time), payable via PayPal.

The developer of Syndicate 7D Tools is SYNDICATE ENT. AB in Stockholm, Sweden.

Other hopes

If the numbers are correct, then for people not looking for 4:4:4, but just very good 4:2:2, it opens doors to shooting with the KiPro or nanoFlash and then upscaling (or downscaling) later.

Allan Tépper’s articles and seminars

Get a full index of Allan Tépper’s articles and upcoming seminars at AllanTepper.com. Listen to his podcast TecnoTur, together with Tanya Castañeda, Rubén Abruña, and Liliana Marín, free via iTunes or at

TecnoTur.us.

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Wow, fascinating! Thanks for this - definitely interested to see what this may bring…

Any insight into the 1620x910 numbers? Seems an odd number to crop to especially since it is so close to full 1080p.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  01/04  at  01:16 PM

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Yes Scottieb,

As I just added above, If that information is correct, then for people not looking for 4:4:4, but just very good 4:2:2, it opens doors to shooting with the KiPro or nanoFlash and then upscaling to 1080p (or downscaling to 720p) later.

Allan Tépper

Posted by Allan Tépper  on  01/04  at  01:26 PM

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Thanks allan - makes sense, but I’m really wondering why those numbers? Seems arbitrary - just wondering if there’s a logical reason why the hdmi out would offer 1620x910 and not full 1080p - it’s not that many extra pixels in each direction, so why does the camera crop to that resolution?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  01/04  at  01:39 PM

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Scottieb

Assuming the number and information is correct, I don’t know why Canon didn’t make it scale to fill 1920x1080 in live mode. Perhaps Canon will answer us here!

Allan Tépper

Posted by Allan Tépper  on  01/04  at  02:07 PM

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I’m wondering whether the quality improvement justifies paying so much for the capture equipment and utils, plus dealing with the crazy annoyance surrounding that reconstruction. Until you shoot with really good primes, I’d guess that crappy lenses cost more in image quality than the in-camera 4:2:0 compression. Plus this is HDMI we’re talking about, which isn’t meant to have the level of reliability and mobility required for such applications. If that was HD-SDI it’d be different. Still, this product might be a must-have tool for some very specific applications.

Posted by Eugenia  on  01/04  at  02:21 PM

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KiPro to ProRes is a way better codec than 4:2:0 H.264. I’d cut in native captured, then crop/scale last step. But it isn’t “real” 4:4:4, there are other plugins to do chroma smoothing (Graeme Nattress’ was one of my faves when I was more into that stuff), BUT this is a good tip nonetheless! But wait, you still have crap resolution, crap aliasing, and other problems. With renting the additional kit, at what point do you say bag it and rent something else, something real? Anyway, good post though!

Posted by Mike Curtis  on  01/04  at  03:27 PM

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but it isn’t 4:4:4 - it is still just chroma smoothing! compare to nattress plugins…

http://nattress.com/Products/BigBox/Bigbox.htm

Posted by Mike Curtis  on  01/04  at  03:28 PM

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Mike,
I really appreciate your comment and have a question for you. When you say: “But wait, you still have crap resolution, crap aliasing, and other problems.”  I must ask you: Is that true even if you record live to KiPro or nanoFlash (for 4:2:2) only were expecting 720p as a final product? Could 1620x910 be treated as oversampling for 1280x720? Despite YouTube’s announcement of 1080p for the web, for general use, I feel much better with 720p for the web for now.

Allan Tépper

Posted by Allan Tépper  on  01/04  at  03:35 PM

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Allan I don’t know but perhaps Mike is referring to the aliasing that happens in-camera, as referenced here:

http://www.dvxuser.com/articles/article.php/20

Meaning that despite the (smoothed) 4:4:4 color space the camera is still aliasing many fine details and not “really shooting” 1080p (or even 910p). Scale it up or down and the aliasing remains.

the article explains it much better than I could ever hope to of course.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  01/05  at  02:05 PM

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Any adaptive chroma algorithm isn’t really recovering 444 from 422, it’s just making 422 look better. But with the Canon, that’s the least of your worries - the aliasing is bad, and the horizontal resolution in 1080p is barely, if anything above the horizontal resolution of 720p anyway, so you never even had 444 to begin with. Some good examples of comparing chroma smoothing with more adaptive techniques are here: http://www.nattress.com/Products/FinalTouch/FTGChromaSharpen.htm
Given the above, I’d suggest that the word “recover” in the title of this article is not correct as it implies that the original 444 data can be recovered, which is something that I doubt is happening.

Posted by Graeme Nattress  on  01/06  at  05:31 AM

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Just to add, the word “reconstruction” you use on the picture is much more appropriate!

Posted by Graeme Nattress  on  01/06  at  05:34 AM

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Thank very much Graeme for your comments. I really appreciate them!

Posted by Allan Tépper  on  01/06  at  05:37 AM

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Thanks Allan. Chroma sub-sampling reconstruction is a fascinating topic, that I’ve spent a fair bit of time researching. It can work well for edges, which is great for keying or strong chroma colour correction, but it’s less good for the actual visual quality of the image as-is because it doesn’t usually help much with chroma texture.

Posted by Graeme Nattress  on  01/06  at  05:43 AM

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Yes Graeme. I know that you are a true authority in this area, and remember your G-Nicer, although I have never used it myself to date.

Posted by Allan Tépper  on  01/06  at  05:48 AM

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I was referring to the above referenced issues with the line skipping and aliasing issues done at/between sensor and output - the depth of field is great, but the aliasing issues are endemic to the output, regardless of compression, AFAIK.

-mike

Posted by Mike Curtis  on  01/07  at  04:57 PM

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