Dv codec panasonic

Other picture defects [ Pix: Defects ] encountered are dropouts and banding a sign of tape damage or head clogging. The most noticeable spatial artifacts are feathering or mosquito noise around typically diagonal fine detail. These are compression-induced errors usually seen around sharp-edged fine text, dense clusters of leaves, and the like; they show up as pixel noise within 8 pixels of the fine detail or edge causing them.

The best place to look for them is in fine text superimposed on a non-black background. White on blue seems to show it off best. The magnitude of these errors and their location tends to be such that if you monitor the tape using a composite video connection, the artifacts will be masked by dot-crawl and other composite artifacts. A spatial quilting artifact can also be seen on certain diagonals — typically long, straight edges about 20 degrees off of the horizontal.

Watching such diagonals during slow pans is often the only way to see the artifact. Motion blocking occurs when the two fields in a frame or portions of the two fields are too different for the DVC codec to compress them together. Motion blocking is best observed in a lockdown shot of a static scene through which objects are moving: in the immediate vicinity of the moving object say, a car driving through the scene , some loss of detail is seen.

This loss of detail travels with the object, always bounded by DCT block boundaries. Finally, banding or striping of the image occurs when one head of the two on the scanner is clogged or otherwise unable to recover data.

It can also be caused by tape damage, or by a defective tape. The tape data rate is doubled to 50 Mbps video and the compression work is split between the two codecs.

The result is a image compressed about 3. So far only JVC is supporting this format, which has resulted in a less-than-headlong rush by the video community to embrace it. It should be noted that both of these companies are well-placed to serve the growing DTV market whatever image format a broadcaster selects. These two companies will be pushing the edge of the DV envelope for quite some time to come…. The first number refers to the The The other two numbers refer to the sampling rates of the color difference signals R-Y and B-Y or Cr and Cb in the digital domain.

Thus you have color samples in each of R-Y and B-Y per scanline. The U and V samples are considered to be co-sited with every fourth luminance sample. Fortunately not! Chroma is sampled times per line, but only on every other line. The theory here is that by evenly subsampling chroma in both H and V dimensions, you get a better image than the seemingly unbalanced , where the vertical color resolution appears to be four times the horizontal color resolution. As PAL DV was intended as a consumer format for off-air recording or camcorder acquisition, multigeneration losses in were considered a less important factor than the optimization of first-generation performance.

Sometimes there is a reason for the higher prices that the poor Europeans are saddled with when it comes time to purchase gear…. Yes indeed. As previously mentioned, BetaSP could be considered a format in terms of component bandwidth, and BetaSP is used for chroma-key applications all the time.

True, the chroma performance of formats is superior to formats, especially in multigeneration analog dubbing. Part of the standard JVC sales pitch for Digital-S is the superiority of which is true , and the utter doom and degradation that awaits you should you try to do anything — including chroma-key — with a format which is, shall we say, a wee bit exaggerated.

Just be sure you take the hype with a grain of salt…. Of more concern is that DV artifacts, especially mosquito noise, may become annoyingly prominent when upconverted. However, the jury is still out on this. You can do cuts-only linear editing over , with no generation loss. You can stick a board into your computer PC or Mac , and transfer DV to and from your hard disk.

If your system can support 3. IEEE is a standard communications protocol for high-speed, short-distance data transfer. They appear to have been developed together.

The data stored on DV tape appear to reflect the packet structure sent across a link to a frightening degree of exactness. The minute ceremony was covered by two cameras; we sync-rolled the VTRs and mixed the show in real time as if it were live. So we dubbed it off via to another DV cassette, inserted a fresh DV cassette, and had another bash at the edit. This time, we liked it. We put the tape into the VX and set up the DHR VTR as the recorder, using the built-in editor to drop the second attempt in frame-accurately atop the first across the wire.

No generation loss. And we still had the first edit on the backup tape, should we have changed our minds. A dub is a digital copy.

Unfortunately, such precisely-locked audio clocks are expensive. Since DV was designed as a consumer format, unlocked audio was allowed as a cost-saving measure. Unlocked audio should not cause audio sync to drift away from video over a long period of time. I have shot one-hour continuous takes of talking heads with a consumer DV camcorder DCR-VX and experienced no drift at all between audio and video.

Also, many non-linear editors output 16 bit Many thanks to Earl Jamgochian at Sony for filling in and clarifying many of the details in this section! While the theory sounds good, real life is sometimes a bit different. Sonys, by contrast, seem to average Clocking rates for other cameras were not discussed. Both the audio and video slave to the data samples in each packet; as these are commingled in the DV datastream, the sound and picture will always play back in sync.

Final Cut Pro, however, uses file referencing to span the 2 Gig limit, allowing captures limited only by available disk space, and the QuickTime media format used treats audio and video as separate tracks, each with its own time reference. When capturing long clips, the drift can become apparent; Final Cut can measure this drift and recalculate the audio sample frequency so that QuickTime playback will stay in sync.

As far as I can tell, the AVI file format used in some Windows-based NLEs does not allow this sort of long-term slippage to occur, but I may simply lack sufficient data. Analog is always safe to use for dubbing or editing. It should also be of no concern when taking the audio in via to a DV-based nonlinear editing system.

Fortunately, the problem is understood by those in the business at least at Apple and Digital Origin , and corrective measures are taken at capture time: Final Cut Pro measures the actual number of samples captured over time vs.

Unlocked is only a potential problem when doing real-time audio and video editing with digital transfer of the audio between source and recorder. This is true in locked or unlocked audio; it can even occur when working in analog.

This is one reason that linear analog audiotape and film fullcoat mag tracks are often spliced at an angle instead of with a straight cut; this mechanically performs a quick crossfade between the two tracks instead of an abrupt transition. When all you are doing is editing one generation down from camera originals to an edit master, and then making release copies on an analog format such as BetaSP, SVHS, Hi8, VHS, or the like, all you need to be concerned about is audible popping or muting.

The release copies will contain an analog track that records what you hear; there are no hidden gremlins due to asynchronous clocking, jitter, or other nasties that so complicate digital audio. If the receiving gear is trying to derive its audio clock from the unlocked audio datastream, the entire downstream audio chain can be rendered unstable and disfunctional.

Furthermore, playback of unlocked audio including edit-point glitches as discussed above into a DAW or other digital audio system can cause a major commotion when the edit-point glitch is played back.

Ever had a really bad splice go through the gate on a film projector, or past the heads on an analog audiotape recorder? A glitched unlocked audio edit is the digital equivalent of that crummy splice, only worse! This solved your problem at the point of playback. If you need to make a tape with locked audio, then….

Hey presto, locked audio! The video can be dubbed via SDI for minimal if any losses. This is also the recommended route of your source audio is not 48kHz since you want the dub to have 48kHz audio for best compatibility. Slow and cranky, but it works. How do I intermix locked and unlocked audio? Furthermore, the meta-data stored with the clip can only remember one audio format per clip. The best thing when doing a linear edit is to use analog audio, or if the only changes you have are between locked and unlocked audio use the digital outputs from a high-end VTR as described above.

For non-linear editing, capture clips each containing only a single format of audio; when you render the finished project, all the audio will be converted to a common format. Sorry, no! Adobe Premiere 4. Premiere audio can drift regardless of whether the source was locked or unlocked. This particular problem is variously attributed to the difference between 30 Hz and the Reportedly Premiere 5. Linear editing Can I use DV in linear editing? What sort of linear editing gear can I get in DV?

What sort of machine control is there? How accurate is it? All work fine as edit sources. Out-points may occasionally be off by a frame or two. Mid-range : you can integrate low-end gear with high-end editing systems by using protocol converters, so that the lowly camcorder or VTR appears to be a standard, RS protocol edit source.

Note however that for the most part these protocol converters allow the low-end decks to serve as edit feeders only, not recorders. There are two different aspects of timecode that people mix up: how is it recorded on tape, and how is it used in editing. The second aspect is what really matters: how does your editor see timecode. Back in the dark, early days of linear editing with analog formats the s! Some clever folks came up with the idea of recording a unique code on every frame, so that edit controllers could repeatably reference an exact frame on tape.

Also, these formats already have digital data sectors on tape; why convert digital timecode to analog waveforms when you can record it as digital data to begin with? These are recorded as digital data in the subcode section of a Hi8 track. Are we having fun yet? There are still occasions where having that LTC signal available on a BNC connector can be helpful, or downright necessary.

What matters is whether or not you have timecode, period and DV does have timecode. Any modern-day edit controller should be able to use the timecode available over a serial protocol connection. The same high quality seen on DV tape is maintained in the computer. Of course, you can spend a lot more, adding onscreen, full-resolution scrubbing; more storage; better machine control and the like. This is a watershed moment in the evolution of affordable desktop editing.

These typically allow the use of other formats with real-time transcoding to and from DV; DV is the native format used on-disk. All of these systems are very new, and most still have some bugs and incompatibilities. Careful attention to detail and optimization of system configurations and drivers are often required. Let them fight IRQ limitations and driver-incompatibility hassles — and be willing to pay for it.

If time is money for you, think about how much time it would take to resolve these hassles yourself it took me the better part of three days to get my DPS Spark installed, working, and stable enough for my satisfaction, since Windows decided to reshuffle interrupts every time I rebooted, and I had an old Matrox Millenium driver that hogged the PCI bus.

Their systems work with a minimum of hassles and their prices are very aggressive. Good customer support, too. You can even order a custom-configured JLCooper control panel with jog-shuttle wheel and 20 dedicated Premiere function keys, for the traditionalist button-masher in all of us. Bloody amazing! Thus a 9 Gig drive works out to about 40 minutes of storage. An array of four such drives yields 2. MacOS Systems 7. The file format used for the stored video can also have the 2 Gig limit.

QuickTime files Mac or PC are also limited to a 2 Gig maximum file size at present, even if the disks the files are stored on can be bigger. There are tricks to get around these limits. Final Cut Pro uses QuickTime reference files for seamless capture and playback without concern for the 2 Gig limit. Toshiba SDJ. Pioneer DVAV. LG BP Medion MD Sony UBP-X LG UBK Sony BDP-S New media comments. Plex Disc BD-R. Princo DVD-R. Kodak BD-R.

Copystars BD-R. Newest guides. Top ffmpeg lossless commands. How does a video codec work? Only the mechanical dimensions of the cassettes are different. The advantage of Digital8 is that the camcorders can play 8mm and Hi8 videos as well.

They even do that better than the old machines, because D8 camcorders have a 'big' head drum like high end Hi8 devices, and the output is already digital and time base stabilized. Color shift, flicker etc. This way you can already make a copy of an Hi8 tape without quality loss. If you buy Digital8 or MiniDV depends on your wallet and on the question if you have many old Hi8 tapes.

The only advantage of MiniDV is that the devices are smaller. They are not that much lighter however and at the moment they cost twice as much for no really obvious reason. PAL versions are much better equipped H ow to convert older formats to digital. Some models in Europe don't have this because it costs extra fees if a device can be used as a video recorder.

Check your unit's specs if it can do it. There also are standalone converters that do exactly the same thing.

What you should beware of are converter boxes with unclear specs, there is a lot of crap around. What is also not a good idea at least in the lower price range are converters that directly convert to MPEG.

The problem with these always is that your computer's CPU has to convert analog to digital on the fly and this can easily result in dropped frames or even crashes. VirtualDub for example has a capture mode that can take signals from a video card but it drops frames every 3 minutes no matter what you do. Many video card's own capturing software is utterly instable.

The best advice of all, so far: get an old Digital8 camcorder with conversion ability or a similar dedicated box, a Firewire card and ScenalyzerLive for the capturing.

That's fool proof. If your tapes are 8mm or Hi8, almost any Digital8 camcorder should be able to play them itself, so in this case one with analog inputs is not necessary. Capturing DV. Scenalyzer Live is the recommended solution for any DV capturing, as it is rock stable, drops no frames even on hardly sufficient system, works in background with no fuss at all, and has a terrific set of extra functions.

I contributed my. ScenalyzerLive also generates. This scene detection BTW is working way better than that of the older Scenalyzer freeware. Unlike StudioDV, Scenalyzer Live can automatically start a new capture file before the 4 GB limit is reached, and if possible also does this at a scene change. It is easy to work with multiple capture files in one StudioDV project, so this enables you to capture as much full resolution footage as your harddrive can take, without having to buy Windows , and use StudioDV to do all editing although I strongly recommend to upgrade to WIndows for video editing.

I don't use XP so far because it is neither different nor better in anything and requires activation, which I regard as an assault on the customer. I don't recommend this anymore but I leave it here for information. The trick is to connect the analog audio outputs of your camera to the line in of your sound card. Set up the spilling system, select the WDM capture device, set audio 'compression' to 32k or 48k 16Bit Stereo depending on your source tape sound format.

Use compatibility mode to capture. Archiving DV tapes Even if you still keep your original tapes, it is a good idea to have a backup. I've seen many tapes getting defective, some of them 'eaten' by worn out drives. This applies to analog tapes as well; capture them to DV format first and then proceed as follows. DVDs are actually so cheap now, it would make sense cutting the original DV capture into approx.

This is easily done with VirtualDub cut functions and direct stream copy. You may want to keep these files until smart upscaling 'double-resolution' and format extension to apps have become mature: DV analog even more so looks crappy on a large flat panel, because of resolution, noise and poor deinterlacing due to the noise; Some hints about dealing with this are in the cleaning page. Probably you want to de-noise, de-interlace to 50p, de-shake, upscale and perhaps even expand to The longer you wait, the better the software for this will get.

E ncoding DV to other formats. You either need to use an interlaced compression format or to deinterlace. I would recommend to use interlaced if you burn DVD or SVCD for playback on stand alone players and TVs, and to deinterlace if the target machine for viewing is only a PC many PC players have deinterlacing ability, so interlaced encoding can also be used.

Important: set offset line to 1 for DV sources, no matter if you're encoding directly from the file or over a frameserver! If you want to keep the maximum quality with camcorder footage, be aware that this footage has lots of motion and is quite noisy. So you NEED to filter it, and as even a simple clear blue sky has some noise even on a digital camcorder with a big chip, you always want to rub VirtualDub and its temporal smoother. More on the filter page. You may also want to use Deshaker, even if the cam had a stabilizer, as most of these stabilizers aren't that good.

The third big issue is the gamma curve of these amateur cameras that makes a sunny day look like a moonshine or thunderstorm scene. Use VirtualDub's levels filter on that. Don't even hope that an expensive pro editing software will give you these abilities that VirtualDub has. These systems can do any kind of effects ,but hardly any decent cleaning! So you should filter it first, even if you want to encode just for archiving. The rest of it is simple: Rum CCE Basic the affordable version of the encoder just at the maximum constant bit rate, i.

Any attempt to improve things by doing VBR variable bit rate or multi pass encodings will not be any better here, as the encoder doesn't know that you never need that noise or those millions of leaves in that wood exactly reproduced ant that for a human being, the face of a person is a hundred times more critical. So don't let the encoder waste bits to noisy parts of the footage and with amateur camcorder footage there will most likely be some of these even after the cleaning , what would happen with a VBR encoding.

Well, you can, but many of these require twice the bit rate for the same quality. So if you don't spend the money for pretty professional editing applications, you may be way better off with using CCE, or some of the really competitive products like Canopus or MainConcept, separately.

More details in the MPEG2 section. The 'field order problem' will most probably not occur with stand alone players, so selecting the correct field order will be all that's necessary. It's not that apparent if you deinterlace anyway, but the swapping provides for a little better quality. Smart Smoother is quite slow but very good.

It doesn't reduce crispness. The noise reduction allows for the MPEG encoding at lower bitrates and also helps the deinterlacer. This reflects only my personal opinion. Be aware that some people tried to sell the SE for almost the price of the full version. Don't fall victim to that especially in the US, there are numerous software cheaters online. The fair price is a fraction of the full version.

All Studio9 versions e. Main restrictions of SE are that it does no motion menus and lacks some fun filters but not the cleaning filters. A lot of info about Studio can be found at the Pinnacle Webboard section: consumer webboard , and also on Mike Shaw's pages. Meanwhile there's Studio12 but as times do change, I'm more fond of the latest Magix software meanwhile and recently added a new page on it.

But nevertheless Studio pioneered intuitive video editing intefaces. So the following may still be interesting. The user interface of Pinnacle Studio is the most intuitive I know: Studio can recognize scenes on the fly because of the time stamp information in DV data.

It assembles a storybook where each scene is represented by one thumbnail image. Then you simply drag these to the timeline as you want, trim them separately, insert transitions and play the result back to tape. The advantage is that this 'timeline' is not continuous like in other programs where you get lost trying to find seconds long scenes in hours of footage. You get a linear display of each scene by double clicking on the thumbnail image and then you can trim just this scene.

Scenes can also be repeatedly used, single frames can be used and displayed for any desired length, audio can be dubbed and mixed in etc. It's not as powerful as Premiere or Media Studio, but much more easy for beginners and in my opinion, also much more easy and useful than the Video Studio that comes bundled with most cheap cards.

Meanwhile, Studio9 has been released which offers more filters and effects and therefore can better compete with 'semi-professional' programs like Premiere or Media Studio.

What is pretty crappy, that even Studio9 still is stuck with a half format preview screen. So one cant't tell if the footage is really crisp.