I’ve been hearing a lot recently, thanks to the fine folks at Creative Cow, about AE and HDV footage. Here is an explanation from Dave LaRonde, frequent contributor of the Creative Cow forums:
Dave’s Stock Answer #1 For Current Footage Woes:
If your footage is any kind of the following — Native HDV, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.
These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, which contain complete frame information, and they toss out the duplicated frame information on the following frames.
In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of woes.
Personally I had very few issues with HDV or XDCAM footage so I didn’t have the need to convert my footage prior of import but if you find yourself wondering what the hell is happening when applying some transformations, then Dave’ explanation sheds some light. My favorite codec for footage interchange is BitJazz’s SheerVideo. It has total fidelity to the original footage, it’s lossless, takes less than half the size of uncompressed and you can use it for roundtripping without loosing a single bit of your original footage.
hey paolo,
my name is danny and i congratulate you on ‘true-color’. i’ve used your calibrations while shooting low budget feature in australia and it looks beautiful… you’re in the credits, my man. was wondering if we could have a chat of the blog re: bitjazz and other, you’v got my email.
cheers mate,
danny.
Hi Danny, thanks. Let me know what you need about bitjazz and I’ll be glad to share what I know.