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General HD workflow concerns
Me and my partners are looking to purchase equipment. We plan to incorporate a BETA SP deck, the SONY EX1, and the ADOBE CS4 production suite; essentially we need the BETA deck for numerous existing clients but anything we shoot we want to have in HD. In order to achieve both we are looking into a turnkey system from B&H that utilizes the Blackmagic Multibridge product.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/514521-REG/B_H_Photo__Blackmagic_Multibridge_Pro_.html
It seems that we should easily get footage in and out from the BETA deck and be able to use an HD television as a reference monitor using the HDMI port. Everything we deliver will be SD. Question: Premiere Pro CS4 appears to be user friendly when it comes to the EX1. Do you foresee any issues with this set-up & is it easy to down convert our HD footage to edit with or does it not require a down convert?
The other major concern is with storing HD projects and field footage. With tapes we just place on a shelf and store the project folders on a hard drive. When a project needs recreated we just batch capture from the tape and then everything is in order. Is it as easy to bring HD footage back into a project?
We plan to copy the field footage onto DUAL layer discs and to external hard drives but this seems as expensive as buying tapes if not more. I’ve had trouble finding HD workflow models – do you know of a good example?
We plan to practice before taking it to the field but want to feel confident in our purchases. In general, having never worked with HD is there anything blatantly obvious that we might be missing?Thanks for any advice!
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2 Replies
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I don’t have any experience with Black Magic products myself, but I have no reason to believe that the multibridge product wouldn’t work for what you’re doing…
(I happen to be an AJA user myself…shoot/edit in HD and simply do a real-time downconvert to Beta SP…I would assume that BM has something similar…)
Archive…if tapeless HD is the goose that lays the golden eggs, you’ve just stepped in the other stuff the goose leaves behind…archive is a question mark for most. there simply isn’t any sort of archive solution that has the cost/robust ratio of tape yet…DVDs (even dual layer) store limited amounts of HD footage…even highly compressed HD footage like XDcam…off-the-shelf harddrives are the container-of-choice for most of us, but when these drives are shelved without spinning up for months or years, there really isn’t a track record of how many will spin back up for how long…so most of us store two redundant drives…
Shelving…you will need strong shelving…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,CPO, Digieffects
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I remember hearing that Sony has a prototype PD format (Blu-Ray) disk drive similar to the PDWU1 that has slots for SxS media, and can copy to dual layer PD media in the field. The price of PD media, especially the dual layer disks, is comparable to HDCAM tape. Maybe this will become a real product at NAB.
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