Compressor 2 and HDV footage

[rjsimp]

rjsimp, thanks for clarifying on some of these points. They are totally true. I was alluding to the sort of editing that you described above when i made my rather broad statements. As i said; for simple editing HDV will do fine... especially if the end product will be a standard def DVD or the like. But i have noticed significant degredation in the video quality with edits of the type you describe... cross disolves, slow fades, fades from black, color correction, etc. Any operation that has to access continuous frames is going to introduce artifacts, sometimes it is worse than others and honestly, a lot of it has to do with the content in the first place. But in generally, it is a 'cleaner' (though not necessarily straighter, or practical) path to convert HDV and other tricky media to a format that is designed to edit better.

What editing system are you using and then what settings? As I said above, I finished a 20 minute underwater video and the entire thing was color corrected, had cross disolves, and fades. I don't have any signs of artifacts or any other noticeable issues that show up even when viewed on a 110" HDTV. I used Final Cut Pro 5 and kept the capture and timeline in HDV, then saved as a self-contained movie. I also print it back to tape from the same timeline and dumped the final movie to my PC using Adobe Premiere 2 so I could get a file using a codec that Windows liked (thank you Apple for making an apple specific codec! )

In all that process, there were no visible signs of any degrading or artifacts. What I was trying to get across above was that, yes it does have to do some work on compressing the HDV with this process, however, it doesn't produce problems if done once, but most certainly would if it was done over and over again on the same footage. Again, I can't see a workflow that you would do this though since you can do everything you want within the timeline and save it once.

I think we agree on this, its just I believe you are saying that the degrading occurrs and is visible sooner than it SHOULD be, I'm not saying your editing system may not produce this problem (I'm very curious what you are using), but I am saying that mine clearly doesn't (and I'm very critical on that sort of thing and can see it when its there) and so it is possible to edit HDV with fades, color correcting, and other transitions while producing clean results.

 

[cap_bert]

FCP 5.0 AfterEffects 7.0 are my weapons of choice. As you said we are saying the same things. It is ABSOLUTELY possible to edit HDV with good results, and as i said, it is in most cases more than adequate for its end use- especially if downsampled. However, I have achieved better results using different methods. I have done extensive testing in this regard, and can see noticable build up of noise and compression artifacts... this is most visible on a monitor where you can solo the blue channel, as this channel tends to expose this sort of artifacting the most.
I want to make it clear the i am in no way bashing HDV. It is a great consumer/pro-sumer format, but it (like other of it's kind, DV, DVCPro, DVCProHD) have limitations due to the extreme nature of it's compression tactics.
HDV: 1080i (1440 x 1080, interlaced), at approximately 25 Mbps data rate
8bit uncompressed:1080i (1920 x 1080, interlaced), at approximately 932 Mbps data rate
this is a ~97% reduction in data... this makes a difference in image quality.