FCP or Photoshop

[offtheroad]

I'm a newbe and have plenty 40+ Hi8 tapes to capture and store on 8TB external HD before editing. Nothing extensive just edit out the blank space and maybe put in a few titles. Should I go ahead and use FCP since I have it or Photoshop 2019 to do it. 'll be using my old Hi8 canon video camera as a deck. I'll have timecode breaks all thru everything if thats a problem that FCP can deal with.

[KarMa]

Photoshop? You mean Adobe Premiere Pro right?

[offtheroad]

Thanks for the reply but No Photoshop allows video editing now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-dpnyRe5EU

[KarMa]

Never knew. How do you plan on capturing your videos. Capture device? Capture program?

[offtheroad]

OK so I guess maybe PS is not able to capture so I'll use FC. So If you please, what precautions do I need to use to beginning to capture all my Hi8 tapes with my camera with FC 10.4 on Mac

[KarMa]

Well it sounds like you are going the DV route for your analog Hi8 tapes. Is this true?

[offtheroad]

Not sure Some of my tapes are DMV does that make a difference?

[KarMa]

How do you plan to capture your tapes? Are you doing it over Firewire, or are you going to capture the analog outputs (S-Video, RCA Composite)? As far as DMV, I don't know what this is.

[offtheroad]

There Digital Video tapes and I'll go firewire into my Mac

[LMotlow]

Hi8 is not digital. It's analog. Capturing analog to DV is an inferior metho0d, and using an NLE to do it is insane.


The subject has been going on since Windows 3.1 (that's since 1992) for computers and since the 1970's for tape mastering outfits. Why are we going thru all this crap again? You need a capture device between your Hi8 player and your computer. The type of capture device you find nowadays is a USB device that's optimized for analog source material, such as a Diamond Multimedia VC500. You capture to lossless media using lossless codecs such as HuffYUV or Lagarith, then you clean up, filter, edit, and then encode for whatever final output you want. The capture software most people use is VirtualDub or AmarecTV. You will also need a player with a builtin-in line tbc (your Hi8 player might have one) or a legacy DVD recorder used as a tbc pass-thru, such as a Panasonic ES10 or ES15.


If you don't want to do it right, save your money and time and find a used DVD recorder and record to high bitrate DVD, edit with a smart-rendering editor and burn it to whatever output format you want. Otherwise you're wasting your time and throwing away money with Adobe and FCP.



If none of that makes sense at this point, you have a lot of reading to do.

[offtheroad]

I'm on a Mac?

[JVRaines]

If you meant Digital8, yes, you can transfer them via FireWire with no loss in quality. If they're really Hi8 (or Video8) and you're using a digital cam, the camera will digitize them as DV and then send over FireWire. DV is a compressed format, so you will lose a little quality using this process. Some people it bothers, some people it doesn't. If you want highest quality, use an analog-digital converter between the camera and the Mac and capture in a lossless codec such as HuffYUV or to a high-quality intermediate codec like ProRes. In this process, you will use the s-video and audio outputs from the camera instead of FireWire.

[johnmeyer]

+1 JVRaines

[offtheroad]

Thanks, I have a PYRO AWLink I've never used should I use it? This all is just family stuff no need for highest quality but ease to get thru all this?

[johnmeyer]

Thanks, I have a PYRO AWLink I've never used should I use it? This all is just family stuff no need for highest quality but ease to get thru all this?

You could try it both ways on a five minute sample, and then view the result on a big screen. Decide for yourself. If you don't notice any difference, go with the DV (Firewire/1394 connection) workflow because nothing edits more easily than DV because it compresses each frame independently (no long GOP compression).

Also, there are far fewer ways to screw up DV.

Many people in this forum don't like DV because, for NTSC, it uses 4:1:1 chroma subsampling which can, under some circumstances, cause slight chroma artifacts. Some people also don't like DV's DCT (discrete cosine transform) compression artifacts, although every codec that uses lossy compression introduces artifacts.

Despite taking flak for recommending using DV, I continue to do so because I've spent the last twenty years fixing screwed-up video, and many of the screw ups come from neophytes (and veterans) who use an analog capture device and then don't get the settings right. You can't do that with DV because the encoding is hardwired inside the camera or deck, and you can't accidentally turn up the proc amp, or set it to PAL instead of NTSC, or change the field order, or do any of the other of dozen things I've dealt with over the years.

I make no claim that DV looks better than a well-done analog capture, but the differences are not that huge. I am still waiting for a really good side-by-side comparison of the same VHS, S-VHS, 8mm, Hi-8, or Beta transfer with one side showing a transfer done the way your are contemplating, with the video encoded to DV inside the camera or deck, and the other showing the ultimate analog transfer. I expect that while you will see some differences, just as you can see differences from an h.264 delivery codec and the original uncompressed video, when you watch on the big screen, you may not see much. This is especially true with consumer analog video from the 80's and 90's which has lousy chroma, luma, and resolution that is much more noticeable to the viewer than DV compression artifacts.

But, like I already said, do the experiment yourself and decide for yourself.

[offtheroad]

Thanks. With that said what are the best settings in FCP for basic capturing from my Sony TRV25 camera. I think I'll go without the PRYO connections. On another post or another forum I was told it would make capturing look worse.

[johnmeyer]

If you are going to capture via analog, use the S-video output. I don't think FCP has any analog capture settings, but someone who uses it will have to tell you for sure.

If you are going to use "i-link" (Sony's term for 1394/Firewire), then there are no settings you can change, although if you use Scenalyzer as the DV capture application it does let you configure the capture to include a second audio channel (which you probably don't have).

[Cauptain]

I started using Photoshop to edit videos in 4K.

He has one of the best upscalers I have ever seen and the result was better than I expected.

Editing frame by frame, using some Photoshop techniques and Avisynth-CRT scripts.

I remember that the original resolution is 320x224 and I rework it in 4k (2880x2160 - AR 4: 3). Final encode using Virtualdub + X264

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwH5FGfEsE4



Claudio