• Panasonic Cameras

  MESSED UP WITH THE VARICAM

  Posted by Guillem Ventura on April 19, 2007 at 4:31 pm

  Hi.
  I just got to this new company: they assigned me a Power Mac with an Aja Kona 3, FCP, Shake, AE and all the toys i’m familiar with.
  It’s alrite working with DVCProHD and HDCam, but when it comes to Varicam i get prety confused.

  The thing is we own an AJ-HDC27H at the facility.
  And we’d like to be able to capture straight from the camera (we will be renting the AJHD1200AE VTR for the regular shootings of hours of tape, but sometimes we’d rather not… and i want to test before a client comes in).

  I understand the VTR automatically outputs from any recorded frame rate (59.94 or 60fps) to any other (60, 59.94, 30, 29.97, 25fps) at the “real” frame rate the footage was captured (let’s say… 17fps).

  But I have to set it up to capture from the camera to Final Cut Pro 5.1.4 thru HD SDI to the Kona 3.

  Problem #1:
  The DVCPROHD Frame converter (at the FCP tools) does only work for 59,94.
  When it does want to work, most of the times it doesn’t start (it was working better with 5.1.2).
  But we are in a PAL environment (Europe), so we’d rather work from 60fps captures, not 59,94fps.
  Is there any workaround?
  Aja was supposed to have some solution, but i couldn’t find it nor got a response form them yet.

  Problem #2:
  We don’t know how to set it up to be able to reconstruct the VARIABLE FILM RATE footage!
  If we know the constant fps the footage was shot, we can.
  But since we captured thru the HD SDI we lost the FLAG FRAMES.
  I read in another post that to identify the Flag Frames i need to capture the TC (ok) and the UB.
  What is the UB? is it the U-bit, the first digits of an STMPE Time code???
  If i get to have this data (the flagged frames) in my computer will FCP be able to reconstruct it propperly or i still need something else?

  Yet another question:
  Should i capture from HD SDI or Firewire?
  FW has metadata embebbed i might need for Variable frame rates, right?
  My experience in DVCam was the signal is somehow “smoother” coming thru SDI, but I don’t know what the scenario is for Varicam.

  THANKS SO MUCH to anyone who read this way-too-long post.
  Any ideas/suggestions are super welcome!

  Greetings from Madrid 🙂
  -g

  da Postpo-dude!
  Quimera Producciones, Madrid.

  Guillem Ventura replied 19 years ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
• 0 Replies

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up