HDV Editing with Premiere Pro 2

Premiere Pro's HDV editing has been completely overhauled from version 2 onwards. With 1.5.1 Adobe used a plug-in from CineForm to edit HDV footage. This converted the footage on capture to a different format which allowed much slicker editing with realtime on-screen effects. With Premiere Pro 2, Adobe decided to write their own plug-in which, instead of using the CineForm intermediate, uses the native MPEG files. MPEG is notoriously hard to edit so how have they done? The answer is amazingly well. Pinnacle/Avid were the best, but we believe that Adobe have done better, and editing their MPEG files is slick and responsive. Of course, you cannot achieve much in the way of realtime effects, even with a very fast PC, although a modest 3.4Ghz machine can manage a cross dissolve. The minimum spec for HDV editing is a 3.4Ghz processor with 2GB RAM, although current Dual and Quad core processors are far in advance of this!

When editing you can view your edits through the HD output of a graphic card on your PC and the quality is actually pretty good for a graphic card output. If you want a full quality video output then you can add Matrox’s RT.X2, which gives you both component HD in and out, as well as output via DVI at full HD quality. The RT.X2 is much better at editing native MPEG files as well, giving DV-like performance on our DVC system. You can go a step further and add the Matrox Axio LE which lets you edit uncompressed HD footage as well as other HD formats like DVCPro HD and Sony HDCAM & XDCAM.

CineForm have also updated their Aspect HD plug-in for Premiere Pro and this does offer better realtime performance than Premiere Pro’s native editing, as well as adding support for other HDV formats such as JVC 720 HDV @ 25fps.

Cineform

Premiere’s native MPEG editing is good, but like all MPEG editors it cannot achieve many effects in realtime at full quality. Aspect HD from CineForm adds full quality realtime effects to Premiere Pro by transcoding all your HDV footage into their own format on capture. So what do you get by buying the extra plug-in?

• Realtime full quality effects. You get a special CineForm editing mode which then gives you several full quality realtime effects. They include: motion paths, transparency, wipes, cross dissolves, some CineForm colour correction filters and non-frame blended slow motion. On the other hand all Premiere Pro’s normal effects have to be rendered, unless using Premiere’s native HDV mode where it will attempt to play all effects and drop frames and quality to do so. When changing parameters of Premiere’s native effects with Aspect HD you do get a preview of a frame on screen but when you come to play the effect you see the original footage playing at full speed which a small red dot in the corner to denote that there is an effect applied. However, the loss of the preview of all effects is far outweighed by getting several layers of full quality HDV playback.
• The Aspect HD plug-in gives you a codec that can be used in any video program. Premiere’s MPEG HDV files can only be read by programs programmed to do so, so making and using HDV files with other programs is easier with Aspect HD.
• Aspect HD can capture either inside Premiere or in its own application. In both you have a choice of quality settings so you can determine how much space the video will consume. On the normal “medium” setting it will take about 40GB of space for each hour of footage, as compared with about 13GB for native HDV footage.
• As you capture Aspect HD captures the original HDV files and converts them on the fly into CineForm format. This process may happen in realtime, but normally you will find that when you finish capturing Aspect HD will take some time to finish the process. On an hour capture with a 3.4Ghz machine it took about 15 minutes to finish the encoding.
• Aspect HD adds support for cameras and modes not supported by Premiere Pro 2. It also gets more frequent updates than Premiere Pro 2 so will support new cameras a lot quicker.
• Aspect HD 4.1 now supports 1280x720: p24/p25/p30/p60 plus 1440x1080: i50/i60/p24/p25/p30. Even the Panasonic HVX200, and “special” modes such as Canon’s “24F / 30F” and Sony’s “CineFrame”.

Aspect HD is £279 ex-VAT £328 inc.

The Matrox Cards

Matrox produce several cards which both hugely improve the performance of Premiere Pro and also add analogue i/o and faster MPEG encoding for DVD writing. The RT.X2 and Axio LE add analogue i/O, full quality realtime effects, and, depending on the card, support for video formats not supported by Premiere Pro on its own, and better forms of editing HDV and other HD formats. They have a range of software and hardware based effects - adding a lot of fancy 3D effects and enhancing many Premiere based ones.

The Power Of X

..is a phrase invented by Matrox to explain how they use both the power of your computers CPU (its Intel Pentium or AMD Opteron) and the power of the processor on your graphic card to produce their range of effects. The obvious intention is to use the most of the resources inside your PC. Nearly all manufactures do this to some extent, with Avid Liquid as the program which uses both processors as much as Matrox.

Filters

The RT.X cards have very similar filter sets - the RT.X2 and Axio filters are identical and use Premiere Pro’s own effects control window and work like every other Premiere effect.

Curiously, in the change from RT.X100 to RT.X2 some filters have been lost - mainly ones people did not use much such as fancy 3D particle transitions - whilst a couple of new ones have been added. If upgrading from RT.X100 to RT.X2, your RTX100 projects will open but the old Matrox filters will not be transferred.

The common filters:

2D and 3D motion paths

Matrox 3D effects are excellent and powered by a graphic processor chip. With the RT.X100 this was on the card, with Axio/RT.X2 this is the graphic card in your PC. The better the graphic card the more layers of effects you can achieve. With our DVC systems we use a state of the art X1900 graphic card with 512MB RAM. For Matrox effects, ATI cards are generally better than nVidia. nVidia cards work and you may choose one of these for some other reason - for example if using Magic Bullet, as this is accelerated by nVidia cards but not ATI ones.

The Matrox standard motion path is accelerated by Matrox GPU effects, although cleverly if the image size is bigger than the project (for example you have used a HiRes still on the timeline and want to pan and scan it) then a software effect is used to maintain the image quality.

Slow motion

Premiere’s slow motion is OK, but not the best. Matrox slow motion is much better, and totally real time even with HD footage. It matches the quality of Edius slow motion - although it is not keyframable. Of course with the Adobe Production Studio using After Effects 7 Professional, you have better quality keyframable slow motion than Edius or Matrox, although not realtime.

Colour Correction

Matrox colour correction is excellent and includes full colour matching. Premiere Pro 2’s standard colour correction is actually very good too, although not quite as simple as the Matrox version and not realtime. You can use both Adobe’s standard effect and the Matrox effect in a Matrox project.

Chroma and lumakey

Matrox keyers are better than Premiere standard and have been improved in the move from RT.X100 to RT.X2/Axio. Edius’ chromakey is still slightly better - although the non-realtime ‘Keylight’ keyer from Adobe After Effects Pro is better than all of them. And of course you can always just pop into AE for your keying and then drop that composition straight on to your Premiere Pro timeline using Adobe’s Dynamic link.

Realtime Premiere Effects

Many of Premiere’s standard effects - practically all the wipes, picture in picture, scale to frame size - are done in realtime by the Matrox cards. All other Adobe effects preview in realtime as well, although most will have to drop frames or play at reduced quality unless rendered (how Premiere would play them without the extra hardware).

Axio & RT.X2 effects

There are some new effects on the Axio and RT.X2 that were not found on the RT.X100. These include: chromakey shadow (add a shadow to your keyed items); secondary colour correction (change just certain colours in the image); shine (generate light beams from your image - typically used to make it appear that light is shinning through a title); surface finish (the image is projected on to a high quality 3D surface, like a brick or block of granite which you can fly around the screen) and track matte (stick a moving or still piece of video on one track and use it to determine the opacity of various areas of your main image).

WYSIWYG support for other programs

All the Matrox cards add a video output - both HD and SD - to various programs, including Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Encore, Discreet Combustion, 3D Studio Max and Newtek LightWave.
With the RT.X100 only one program could use the output at a time. With RT.X2/Axio you can have several programs outputting simultaneously.

Souped Up Adobe Media Encoder

All the Matrox cards have their own version of the Adobe Media Encoder - exactly the same as the Adobe version but faster!

The RT.X2

• Standard definition and High definition analogue i/o with HDV through FireWire.
• Component HD in and out.
• Matrox filters now use Premiere’s effects control window - not a special Matrox dialogue box.
• Fast encoding of MPEG from timeline, but no hardware and no MPEG capture.
• Uses the computers’ graphic card for the GPU effects so better card means more effects.
• In standard def we can get 6 layers on a good system - with RT.X100 you only got 2-3.
• For HDV does better editing of native HDV files than Premiere Pro, with full quality effects and component output at full quality.
• Edits at HDV resolution - 1440 X 1080.
• PCI Express 1 card.
• The RT.X2 is the future - all Matrox development will be focused on this and Axio.

Card price (with Premiere Pro 3) £999.00 ex-VAT

Typical system: £2800.00 ex-VAT £3290.00 inc.

Axio LE

• More or less an RT.X2 with more ins and outs and more supported formats. (Actually its the other way round, the RT.X2 is a cut down Axio.)
• Support for formats otherwise not supported in Premiere Pro: DVC Pro HD, uncompressed 8 bit HD, plus Sony XDCAM and Panasonic P2.
• HD Component i/o as well as HD SDI.
• Edits at full HD - 1920 X 1080. Can capture through component into this format, either uncompressed or in MPEG I-frame.
• Exactly the same filter set as RT.X2.
• PCI-X card with rackmountable breakout box.

Card price £2,195 ex-VAT

Typical system: £6525.00 ex-VAT £7666.00 inc.