They edit just as well as they look. he can get away with that, as he's in Japan, but we can't cuz we're in the US....
Dang, those guys get all the luck. :-)

I down loaded one file but the extension on it is strange - bikepssngby.m2t. What do I use to open it? I've tried with Vegas but it doesn't show up as a readable format? Did I download the wrong file?
Randy

.m2t is an MPEG2 transport stream, which uses very small packets (I think they're 50 bytes) with a more robust error correction than "regular" MPEG2 files. It is the same MPEG format used to broadcast HiDef programming. I think this 25Mbps HDV format is going to be quite solid. Certainly less prone to tape dropouts.

John

Thanks John. My system must be to slow to play it as WMP10 tries to open and play it but it won't. Others on the DV Info Net thread say they can so I'm assuming it's my slow processor. No worries.
Randy

Yeah, it's probably going to require some horsepower. I still haven't downloaded the files, I'm at my girlfriend's house and I'm on dial-up. (She's such a Luddite!) Anyway, I can't wait to get back to my place to download the files and see what can be done with them. I fully intend to get the pro version of the FX1 as soon as it's available, so I need to figure out a work flow for dealing with the HDV files. I'm guessing that I may be able to use ProCoder to convert the files to low-compression MJPEG .AVI files until Vegas is able handle the files natively. I also have Premiere Pro v1.5 with the MainConcept MPEG Pro plugin, so I'm pretty sure it will handle the files just fine right now. I'll report later.

John

beautiful clips! I just downloaded a couple of them and renamed them to .mpg and they played fine in windows media player.

eg dwaterfront30p.mpg


ken

I have downloaded all of these files. They play well in Windows Media 10 Player. They also load perfectly into Vegas 5.0b. I moved the files directly from the Vegas Explorer Window into the Vegas timeline. I am now going to convert the video to SD 16:9 format and burn to a DVD since I don't have any other way to get the files to my HD TV. How nice it would be to have a DVD player that handles Windows media format files.

Tom

I could even load, see and playback the file in Vegas without renaming.

Marco

tnw2933:

If you had the My-HD Card you could render the file to the Cineform Connect HD spec then change the file ending from mpg to tp and then access it with the My-HD card and watch it on your HDTV although it would be 720 x 30p.

JJK

JJK,

It gets even better than that! I just renamed the files to have a .tp extension and the MyHD card played them PERFECTLY at 1920x1080i. I just watched them on my Sony XBR910 34" HDTV and it looked amazingly good. In fact, better than a lot of the HD delivered here off-air or via satelite. Based on what I just saw, I will be buying the pro version of the camera the SECOND it's available. Is it a Sony CineAlta? No, but it romps all over ANY SD DV camera on the planet. I am jazzed. HiDef for the masses!

John

I'm probably not the only person wondering....what is the expected street price?

Again thanks John for the headsup. I quess Sunday I'm buying a couple of MyHD cards for our computers.

Here's one place to get them and they're currently "on sale."

Digital Connection MyHD MDP-120 $239

John

$3700 US.



http://news.sel.sony.com/pressrelease/print/5118
http://www.sonystyle.com/

Okay, JohnC, your post is yesterday AM. You're kidding, right? When did this happen? I've been gone for one week or so and you guys got REAL HD to work in vegas? You mean it ACTUALLY WORKS? I don't get this. I thought it was going to be like $32,109.87 out of my lunch money after letting me plug all that high-end stuff in. You're saying that for $250 I can capture HD and Vegas is actually going to EDIT it like DV?

WAIT A SECOND HERE. WHAT'S THE DRAWBACK? You're not telling me something....

X

Nope,
if you want to capture HD you'll need to spend a LOT more than $32K, we're talking about HDV which is a very different beast.

Bob.

Okay, all things in twos -- the half that has to do with that video card is clear as mud. Would anyone care to explain it to me so that it makes sense?

It seems that card is only good for outputting video captured via firewire, and there's no way to use it to get HD into the PC box.

From their website:
Q. Can I record cable or satellite HD programs?
A. No. All HDTV card "stores" high-def signals in their raw data form and decodes the signal during playback. Since Cable and Satellite services do not use 8VSB modulation, their signals require dedicated tuners, and once decoded, cannot be routed to the input of the HDTV PC cards.

Okay, but then they add this which is confusing:

Q. Can I record analog TV?
A. Yes, but the AVI files created by the card has to be viewed with Windows Media Player or some other non-MPEG decoder.

I think what they mean is referring to their software recording capability, not their output capability. In other words they basically don't record in MPEG-2, which is totally useless actually, for any kind of bulk recording.

Still not clear on the options -- this doesn't sound very good without a decoder and encoder. The daughter card is only a DVI output? Big deal?

Am I missing something? The big news then is with Vegas doing HD USABLY. Is it true? Or is it a rumor? (Thanks, Memorex.)

X

Bob (Farss)

Ahah! I knew it. 8^(>

John reported 1920 x 1080 which is HDTV, and compares it to HD signals off the air. Hmm. From a one-chip camera that maxes out at 1440 x 1080 interlaced? Do you need glasses John? Actually those broadcasts are probably not shot in HD either, so you may be looking at roughly the same signal.

Just an FYI, there's some technology around the camcorder, I mean corner, that should increase the tonal range by up to 4x, kind of like a tonal range compressor circuit that changes light sensitivity pixel by pixel. It's been out for a year in a still camera or two (Fuji? or Fujitsu?), and I guess scanning backs employ the technology in view cameras. Any judgement on FX1 in that neck of the woods?

All right, enough of this hyperstimulation, I'm going to go get the clips. I hope they'll play on my laptop cause my box is in pieces.

X

All I know is that HDV quality is the same as I see on the HDTV over the air channels on my Sony HDTV set. In fact it's better because I don't get the sometime satellite dropouts or signal fades.

JJK

OK,
I've looked at some of this footage, it doesn't look as good as the original stuff posted by the Vegas guys but then that was shot to look good. I can so far see nothing wrong and I got pretty excited seeing the stuff shot off the bike, heaps of motion. However with mpeg-2 encoding it's the total number of pixels that change between frames that counts and that footage has so much MB it wouldn't stress anything.
Now we've already ordered a couple of these cameras, so yes we (I) am excited about the possibilities. However please, please understand this isn't HD, it's HDV and there's a big difference. HD samples at 4:4:4, SD at 4:2:2, DV at 4:2:0 (or 4:1:1 if it's NTSC) and HDV at 4:2:0, so going to NTSC you'll already take a color space conversion. But even so the difference between 4:4:4 and 4:2:0 is huge. How big is it visually? We'll I'm no expert but I've been told if you intercut the two it really sticks out.
Does this matter, I don't really know, it may mean nothing to some or it may mean everything. I know I'm playing devils advocate here but for many going down the HDV path is going to mean spending a lot of money, yes it's petty cash compared to real HD but for a lot of guys here it'll be a major investment and I just don't want to see anyone get burned.
So here's my spin on it, these cameras are already being offered here at a decent discount off the Sony RRP, PD170, DVX100As, XL2s etc aren't being offered at fire sale prices yet if I can believe all the hype these cameras will soon be obsolete, well actually maybe even most of Sony's broadcast line will also go the way of the Dodo.
Now if all this is true, it'll be the most spectacular case of a multinational shooting itself in the foot in history. I hope it's true, I really do, but I've been disappointed too many times by The Next Big Thing to not be very cautious.
Bob.

"John reported 1920 x 1080 which is HDTV, and compares it to HD signals off the air. Hmm. From a one-chip camera that maxes out at 1440 x 1080 interlaced? Do you need glasses John? Actually those broadcasts are probably not shot in HD either, so you may be looking at roughly the same signal."

"X",

I am fully aware that HDV is 1440x1080i. The MyHD card can, in hardware, on the fly, upconvert and downconvert to various ATSC resolutions. What I was saying was that I was viewing the 1440x1080 HDV video clips through the MyHD card set to display 1920x1080 on my Sony XBR910 34" HD monitor. The MyHD card was scaling the 1440 to 1920. By the way, the FX1 is a three-chip camera, not a single chip.

The MyHD card does NOT record analog HD in any way. It is merely capturing the digital bitstream off the air and converting it to component analog video for display or storing it on the hard drive for later playback. I used it to play back the unmodiifed HDV video clips and it worked fine. The MyHD card is capable of playing back MPEG2 Transport Streams that have been encoded at up to 40Mbps.

John

Right JohnC, there have been a few minor excursions outside the boundaries here.

You know, this is off topic kind of, but I'm thinking MPEG-2 is not the equal of DVCPRO 50 certainly with regards to editing. There are other heated threads on that particular subject again. And with appreciation for all the excitement, I really think that is probably the superior format and that I had better learn more about it before I invest pocket change in a super consumer camera. That said -- at $3600 the FX1 is light and disposable (not literally of course, but relatively, say, if you're going to ride your bike with no hands while operating it?)

So thanks, Farss, for caring. When I was 14 or so I must have spent an entire year doing nothing but reading everything about 35mm (in my spare time of course). In five years I had a part-time career and got small-time famous for "getting the shot." I had modest equipment but it fit me, and I knew how to use it. Now these amazing tools are tantalizingly close, only they take a grown-up budget and yet another year to understand beyond the basics of DV.

I'm getting that the only real solution to the middle path for a low-end documentary producer is DVCPRO 50, Final Cut Pro, and an apple mainframe. With that I might want to throw in a "disposable" HDV camcorder, as long as I can get it to a real editable format and preserve it there as edited source.

X