Hi,  I have mentioned before that I can't capture HDV from my JVC HD100U through MC (turns out they don't work well together).  So I have been using FCP for capturing which works fine.  But whenever I import it into MC I have a huge loss of quality.  My import setting is set to DNxHD 60, and when I import a 70mb QT movie (Apple HDV 720p24 Codec) that looks crystal clear it ends up being about 270mb and not nearly as good looking.  If I up the settings the file sizes are soo big they fill up my external drive before I can even import half the movie, and still the footage isn't quite as clear.  Any ideas on how to get better imports from QT .mov files?  I was thinking maybe an MPEG streamclip batch conversion might work well but haven't tried that yet.  So any ideas?

As far as I know there is no interchangeable format between FP and MC.  I have never seen an option to capture DNxHD.  I also tried the MPEG streamclip and it has the same effect as importing into MC.  I can take a 70MB clip and convert it to DNxHD's highest resolution or 1:1 MXF and I will get a file as big as 800MB but it still doesn't look as good as the original clip.

I would really appreciate the help on this because I've done an important edit in MC already with lower res (offline) and now I need to make the online edit in the best quality.  So I just need to be able to import clips in the proper resolution.

Thanks

A few questions. 

What ends up being 270mb?  The resulting mxf file? 

Can I see a screen snap of the QT file and a screen snap of the import? 

Is the quality toggle on the lower left set to green/green BTW?

How much drive space do you have?

How long is the clip/clips

I'd also like to see the import settings... if you want prisitne video, you need to import it at the highest quality possible.  You mentioned upping the settings?  What does that mean exactly?

Here, I will upload a couple of screen grabs I just took.  For this particular clip the original .mov file (video only since we didn't record sound on this shot) is 99MB.  The resulting MXF file is 289MB.

The quality toggle on the lower left was set to yelow/green.  What should that change?

I have about 150GB left.  The mov files from the capture add up to 16GB in total.

The clips very from 10 second inserts to 4 minute dialogue shots and anywhere in between.

When I mentioned upping the setting I was talking about changing it from DNxHD 60 to DNxHD 90 or 1:1p 10b MXF.

I should also mention that im using MC academic version (don't think that should make any difference).  And the biggest difference in quality comes when it gets burnt to DVD and watched on a TV.  Me and a friend both did seperate edits of this short to see the outcome (his was done in FCP with the original footage).  When putting them on DVD his looks twice as clear as mine even though we both used the same export settings and the same dvd burning program and the same brand dvd's.

Thanks again for any help.  I would love to keep using MC but if im gonna have this loss of quality I might have to resort back to FCP.

This is the original mov.

The imported mxf.

Ok... thanks for info.  Yellow/Green means you are displaying the image at Half Quality.  Setting it to Green/Green will up that to full quality.  But that's just a display thing while editing.  It only effects the S/R monitors and any external monitors.  Your exports should still be fine for DVD.  However, what I'm seeing is an RGB haze on the image.  It looks to me like you are importing 601 footage with RGB settings.  This would cause the nasty grey haze which combined with the half quality display settings, is likely the cause of the issues.

Thanks alot for the help.  That made it look alot better, its almost the same quality now.  Its just a shade darker in the shadows, which I don't actually mind.  But is there a reason why the size is soo much bigger?  I was under the impression that DNxHD created smaller files while keeping the resolution?  Or is that only when originally capturing using that codec?

Thanks again.

Ben

bengoyert:

Thanks alot for the help.  That made it look alot better, its almost the same quality now.  Its just a shade darker in the shadows, which I don't actually mind.  But is there a reason why the size is soo much bigger?  I was under the impression that DNxHD created smaller files while keeping the resolution?  Or is that only when originally capturing using that codec?

What frame rate are you shooting at?

DNxHD is an i-Frame Codec and HDV is a Long-GOP codec. This is why the size is so different.

Have you ever tried to capture the HDV stream with DVHSCap and importing the .m2t file into the Avid? HDVxDV could capture and convert the .m2t file into a DNxHD QuickTime file.

Im shooting at 720p24.  With a JVD HD100U.  I can't capture via CapDVHS because Im running a mac, and I wanted to try HDVxDV but the demo wouldn't work for me and I didn't want to buy it without testing it first.

Im fine with the quality of the importing now.  I do wish I could just capture into MC though, would be nicer.

Now I've hit another snag hahaha!  If I delete the original files I used to edit, it says media offline in the timeline.  But I cannot for the life of me re-connect it to the new import.  In the Relink Dialoge Box my only option is "Relink offline master clips to online media files" then it searches and says no clips were relinked.  Any more advice?

I actually meant DVHSCap. If you delete the clip you'll need to select the clips or sequence and batch import them.