This is a great article. Understanding all the facts of video capturing is a little bit difficult. The amount of resolutions, frame/field frequency, the different codecs doesn’t helps either. It’s important to have a place were we can have basic and advanced information (and growing!) about those important issues.
Thanks to Provideo Coalition and specially to Mr. Allan Tépper.
Posted by R_Andreu on 01/04 at 06:51 PM
Does HDMI capture preserve the date and time codes?
Posted by DanConklin on 01/05 at 09:35 AM
Thank you R_Andreu!
DonConklin: HDMI by itself does not. However, you will discover ways to preserve that information in the upcoming article: “Controlling HDV when capturing HDMI” on January 12th. Stay tuned!
Posted by Allan Tépper on 01/05 at 09:45 AM
So, if I have a Canon XH-A1 and put the HDV tape from it into a Canon HV-30, which has an HDMI out, then I can import into a mac pro or macbook pro with another HDMI card, and get the benefits described?
Is there another way to do this from my XH-A1 HDV tape?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/05 at 01:41 PM
Hello Laceishere,
It will work, although if what you shot in the XH-A1 is “24f”, it would play as 59.94i (“60i”) on the HV30’s HDMI output, as explained in the articles. To play or ingest footage shot in the XH-A1, you could use any of the Sony decks mentioned (HVR-M25A, HVR-M35).
Posted by Allan Tépper on 01/05 at 02:39 PM
hello - I don’t understand the benefits of hdmi capture vs firewire - shooting on a z7u I understood that after it’s on tape there is no real benefit to capturing via hdmi as the footage is already compressed - certainly better hdmi than component but why not just use firewire?
thanks
Posted by Jamie on 02/12 at 11:25 PM
Jamie,
When you compare FireWire with HDMI, you are correct: there is no benefit in picture quality. However, there are several other advantages as explained in the article, whenever your project includes critical multilayer editing and/or independently recorded 48 KHz audio which needs to be lip-synced. If you try to do either of those two things from your raw long-GOP HDV footage directly, you’ll find that what you see is rarely what you eventually get. Please re-read the article in order to understand the incontrovertible reasons why, and the undisputable advantages of capturing via HDMI or HD-SDI directly to an i-frame códec in those cases. Yes, they have nothing to do with picture quality (when compared with FireWire), but they indeed matter in many cases. By the way, if you read my “Sony upgrades 3G HDV camcorders to universal” article, you’ll see how you can upgrade your Z7U to world-class compatibility.
Allan Tépper
Posted by Allan Tépper on 02/12 at 11:43 PM
