For the capturing of our Saturday service message we are using a Canon XL H1 camera, which is mounted on the ceiling. The mounting does involve an adjustment option so we can modify the camera height for different speakers. The XL H1 may also be adjusted using Canon Console, which is Windows-based software that allows you to control the functions of the camera remotely via Firewire. The XL H1 camera has a HD-SDI output that delivers an uncompressed HD signal.

The video from the XL H1 is captured via a Mac Pro with a Blackmagic Design Decklink Extreme HD Capture Card. We capture live into Final Cut Pro using the DVCPRO HD codec. The audio send is sent to a separate sound board, mixed down and recorded to the video track via the XLR inputs on the Decklink cards.

After editing, the final file is exported and transferred to multiple hard drives (RAID0 and eSata) that go to each of our locations for Sunday morning services. We are using ProPresenter for presentation of all media. The software allows for easy point-and-click operation of all media elements, which are played from the external hard drive.

Each location has Mac G5 or Mac Pro equipped with Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme cards. These cards have a component output that we connect to our projectors. The machines are all rack mounted in individual carts that allow for easy portability, set up, and tear down. Our projectors are Panasonic PT-D7700U (7,000 Lumen 1400×1050)

For all of our off-site videos we use two Panasonic AGHVX-200 cameras which record to Firestore FS-100 external hard drives or P2 cards, which allows us to avoid the use of tapes.

Technorati Tags: HD, DVCPRO HD, Canon XL H1, Panasonic, HVX-200, Blackmagic Design

According to ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) president Mark Richer, the ATSC standard does not require minimum bit rates for over-the-air broadcasters. It’s pretty amazing that there is no enforced standard for HD broadcast quality. Basically the bottom line right now is you have to offer a minimum 480i signal which typically comes in at 4 to 6 Mbps. ( The max each 6 megahertz channel can handle is 19.3 Mbps) Seems like there is a lot of space that they could use to increase the quality.

Here is a great article from Popular Mechanics on the details.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4275063.html?page=2

Technorati Tags: HDTV, Broadcast, HD, Cable, Satellite, Bitrate, ATSC, 1080i, 720p

Drama in the sky – Time Lapse from Paul Klinger on Vimeo – You can’t embed the HD Version here so you’ll have to click the HD button and go the the Vimeo site.

Vimeo offers its HD service in 720p. Sure its not 1080, but how many people can handle 1920×1080 on their home computers? I would say at this point its still the minority. So 720p does the job and is a nice jump up from the 480 stuff that we are used to.

Vimeo is using On6VP flash for video playback on its site. much like YouTube is doing. YouTube however also offers an h.264 version. (mp4 version) You can add &fmt=18 at the end of any YouTube URL and it will play you the higher quality h.264 version. (stereo audio too) This is how you are able to watch YouTube clips on many devices like the PS3. There is talk on a couple of the Vimeo forums about the possibility of moving to an h.264 format in the future especially when Flash 9 gets a full roll-out as it will natively support playback of h.264 video. The problem with this is that playing an h.264 720p streaming video over a browser on an older machine is probably not going to go well. So Flash for now is the best course.

Once you have uploaded your 720p video, Vimeo keeps the original resolution of 1280×720. During playback you can press the full screen button. Once in full screen mode, on the right there is a toggle for scaling. Which is nice because scaling up from 720p on a hi res monitor looks less than acceptable. Turning scaling off lets you watch the 720p video in its true resolution of 1280×720.

Overall… It’s a nice service. Would love to see some church’s start to stream their webcasts in 720p too.

Technorati Tags: Vimeo, 720p, H.264, YouTube, On6VP, HD

Being creative is hard work that takes blood, sweat, tears, energy, time, talent and resources. It’s just plain hard! So many times its just easier to put the ship on cruise control and do what you know. You feel like well it worked before so maybe it will work again.  Or maybe it’s never worked. =)  But you just keep doing it. So many times at work I am called on to “whip up” something creative… To design something, produce something, or create something.  Creativity on demand doesn’t always just happen.  Sometimes, some of my most creative ideas come at 11 o’clock at night and not at 1:30 in the afternoon.

But we have to push ourselves if we want to win the right to be heard as a church.  Everything in our culture today is clamoring for the attention of people.  How will the Church gain the attention of the masses in order to spread the Gospel. How will we “Compel them to come in” (Lk 14:23)

So basically we are going to stop everything for one day and shut everything down. (sort of =)  We just want to basically put everything on the table and say, “if we could start over tomorrow and scrap everything we have done, how would we do it?” If you could start fresh… scrap everything that you have done just because you have “always done it that way”… How would you start over?

If you are a video editor by now you have probably seen Apple’s new Final Cut Studio 2. We’ll we’ve cracked open our copies have learned a few new thing. One of the things a lot of people have been talking about is Apple’s new ProRes 422 codec. So whats the big deal? Here are a few of the features.

Apple’s ProRes 422 is a brand new “virtually lossless” codec which operates in 4:2:2 chroma sampling. ProRes boasts being a very lightweight and manageable codec. Ok… so compared to what? Well if your dealing with Uncompressed HD which operates at a data rate of about 1.5 Gbit/s then yes, it would be very lightweight. However, ProRes runs at a data rate of 145 Mbps at Normal setting, and a data rate of 220 Mbps at High Quality. Now Compare this to the other flavors of HD and it dosen’t appear to be so lightweight. Sony HDCAM’s data rate is 140 Mbps, DVCPRO HD runs at 100 Mbps and HDV runs at 25 Mbps. So what does this mean? Well if you are using one of these flavors of HD codec and compression, than you are already dealing with a format that is lighter than ProRes 422.

Don’t get me wrong ProRes is very cool. It’s amazing what they you are able to do with it. Like for those who are looking for a great archiving solution for some Uncompressed HD files, ProRes might be the answer you have been looking for. You can also use ProRes to re-encode your HDV or XDCAM HD footage. These formats record in Long-GOP MPEG-2, which end up being extremely processor intensive. Rendering these formats into ProRes 422 is less processor intensive and also reduces MPEG-2 artifacts.

You can also capture to ProRes, but you will definately need a beefed up mac in order to capture straight to ProRes. Your system needs to be capable of capturing 10-bit uncompressed SD. But unlike capturing uncompressed footage, which is really just a fast pipe and big drive question, ProRes raises the bar by also demanding some processing power for on-the-fly encoding.

Well there’s my two cents on ProRes 422 for the moment. I hope you have enjoyed. =)

Technorati Tags: Final Cut Studio 2, FCP, Final Cut 6, Apple ProRes 422, DVCPRO HD, HDV, HDCAM, XDCAM HD, Uncompressed HD,

Hope you enjoy.

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4

Just thought I would share with you an article that just got published this month in Church Executive Magazine by some crazy guy. Man, they will let anybody write for them =)
Hope you enjoy.

Link

As for the machines: Each location has a dual 2.0GHz processors Mac G5 with 1Gig of memory. They all also have the Blackmagic HD card, the DeckLink HD Pro PCIe. These cards have a component output (Y, Pb, Pr) that we run up to our projector. The external hard drives are connected via Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b). This is the new firewire protocol which supports data transfer rates of up to 3.2Gbit/s. I’m sure that we’re not going that fast but we are able to run ProPresenter and our videos right off the hard drives.

The audio is a little complicated. The audio comes through the Blackmagic card, but the card only has digital (SPDIF/AES) sound output. This would be great if we were running a 5.1 or 7.1 surround system, but right now we’re not and our sound board does not have a digital input. So we had to get a D/A audio converter that converts our digital signal to analog and allows us to use plain old left and right RCA cables to connect to the sound board. At the theaters we use RME ADI-2, a Hi-Performance 192 kHz/24 Bit 2-channel AD/DA-converter.

These Macs are all housed in individual units that allow for easy portability, set up, and tear down. The G5’s are all rack mounted along with the D/A audio converter. We have the screen, keyboard, mouse, and the cables for the hard drive (power and firewire 800) on a little platform on top. We placed BNC component plugs on the side of the unit along with RCA connectors. So basically all we have to do in the morning is plug in the power cable, the video cable, sound cable, and the hard drive and we’re good to go.

As for projectors, at our Ballston theaters location we have a Christie LX-45 that we fitted with a long throw lens and put in the projection booth in the morning. It has a native resolution of 1024×768 and accepts HD signals. At the Union Station theaters we use Panasonic PT-6600UL projectors. These projectors have a native resolution of 1366×1024 and also accept HD signals. We’re looking to upgrade to true 1080i projectors sometime in the future.

National Community Church, High Definition, HD, Cannon XL-H1, DVCPRO HD, Decklink Pro HD, Apple, G5 Quad

Technorati Tags: National Community Church, High Definition, HD, Cannon XL-H1, DVCPRO HD, Decklink Pro HD, Apple, G5 Quad

It all starts with the camera. We use a Canon XLH1 mounted on the ceiling at Ebenezer’s. The mounting does involve a level of adjustment so we can re-aim the camera for different speakers. Unfortunately, we currently can’t do any camera movements during service and only have the one camera that we use for the video message. The camera has a HD-SDI output that sends out uncompressed HD signal that we run up into Pastor Dave’s office. We’ll probably never use the tape heads in the camera as we get such a high quality signal from the SDI out.

In his office he has a beast of a machine. PD uses a quad 2.5 GHz processors Mac G5 with 8Gig of memory. (It’s where all our HD editing and rendering is done.) His main monitor is a 30in cinema display and he has a Toshiba 27in LCD TV that is connected as a secondary display on which we can preview the shot. We are able to evaluate the camera shot from PD’s office before service so we can adjust the camera shot, light levels, white balance and get a pretty good idea of what the shot looks like.

We use a Blackmagic HD PCIe card, the DeckLink HD Pro PCIe, that has an SDI in and allows us to capture full uncompressed 10bit, 1080i with 4:2:2 chroma sampling. Using Final Cut Pro HD we capture the sermon as it is preached. For audio there is also a mix out from the soundboard that goes up to PD’s office. He has a mini board there that he can use to adjust levels before the sound going into the line-in input on the Mac.

After capture of the video post-production begins. We’ll cut what we’ve captured to include just the sermon (trimming things from the beginning and end), add some fades, and splice in any video clips that happen during the message. (This way when the video is played on Sunday it can run straight through without having to worry about the clips.) We’ll also do any color correction we might think is necessary, although we try and avoid this by getting a good white balance as it takes a bit of time to render 40 minutes of HD video, not something we want to do on a Saturday night. And then we add the audio track. Now, the audio is a little tricky as we’ve discovered that there’s a small delay in the playback of video compared to audio during service. So we have to move the audio about 5-7 frames back in the timeline so that when played on Sunday morning it all matches up. After we’re all done with this we export to a quicktime movie format.

National Community Church, High Definition, HD, Cannon XL-H1, DVCPRO HD, Decklink Pro HD, Apple, G5 Quad

Technorati Tags: National Community Church, High Definition, HD, Cannon XL-H1, DVCPRO HD, Decklink Pro HD, Apple, G5 Quad

There are so many things out there today that claim to be High-Definition. Like the other day I saw a Windex commercial claiming that Windex would give you High-Definition glass. I was like “Are you kidding me with that!?”

I won’t be able to cover everything but I’ll try and scratch the surface and help give you a better basic understanding of HDTV.

Let’s start out with a basic definition of what High-Definition is as it pertains to Television. High-definition television (HDTV) means broadcast of television signals with a higher resolution than traditional formats. The traditional format here in the US is NTSC. (Named after the committee that created it, the National Television Systems Committee)

Now let’s cover HDTV formats. If you’ve looked at HDTV’s at your local Best Buy then I am sure you have seen the common HDTV formats of 720p and 1080i. Below I’ll list the most common formats to the US

SDTV – 480i 60 (NTSC), – This is the average Joe TV that you buy
EDTV – 480p 60, – This is what you need to use with a progressive scan DVD player
HDTV – 720p 60, 1080i 60 – the most common HDTV formats in the US

(little subscript numbers are frames per second if progressive or fields if interlaced)