The unbearable evilness of Canon

Repeat with me. HDV is Evil and Canon is it's father.

I had an encounter with the Canon XL HD1 tonight. The camera is on loan to us for the summer because Canon is generous and Panasonic is not. We had the Pana HDVX100 for about a week, and it was sweet. Those P2 cards are a pleasure to work with. We actually had a number of HDV cameras- the Sony, the JVC, the Pana, and the Canon (all the under 10 grand cameras). The blacks on all of them are incredibly noisy. We shot on each camera and tested the footage in FCP. No problems. Until I went to capture stuff from the Canon tonight.

One of the other staff editors had captured a tape earlier in the day. When he went back to look at the footage, there was a significant drift in the audio. Like, insane type drift. The problem was it played back fine in the camera. So wtf was the problem? Had to be in the capture. So I used the power of TEH INTERWEB and found out what the problem was. Here's my e-mail to the other editors:

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Right. So the reason we can't capture that crazy footage is because it was recorded in 24F, a crack-ass proprietary format Canon created and provides no support for. If you record in anything BUT 24F on that camera, Final Cut Pro has much love for you. Otherwise, eh, fagheddaboutit. Apparently the folks at Apple demoed a patch for this aggravating problem at NAB, but yeah, it ain't available yet. Lovely.

But some folks have decided this is a money making opportunity for them- check out their solution at http://www.hdvxdv.com/. It's only $80! What a deal! I actually found out about this on Apple's support forum (don't fall off your chair) and this is the easiest work around out there, unless we have a fancy pants Kona card I don't know about. And even then, the work around with Kona is a PITA.

Ergo, I've installed a demo on Vidor and Hitchcock. You first must import the footage into the program, then have the program transcode it. DVCPro HD is recommended. You can view test footage I tried out on Vidor. It works like a charm and comes in at a whooping 3/4th a gig for 1 minute of footage. And that tape is 40 minutes or so. Yeah. But no audio lag. Feel the love.

The demo puts a nice sparkly watermark over the footage, but at least you can fiddle around with it. I did not take more than 5 minutes into the machine, but at least we know it works. If Lightener worked in this assinine format, he must've had this application on a machine available. Otherwise, I've no idea how he worked with it. FWIW, the transcoding takes some time. I'd recommend setting something like this up overnight after it captured, and making sure we had a helluva lotta free space on a drive.

More reading on the matter for your pleasure:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1789021�
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2138322�
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What kind of company creates a format that no one can edit with? No program out there can deal with the 24F format. Seriously. WTF? Even Panasonic worked with FCP to deal with the P2 cards.

OH THE INSANITY!