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A Bunch of Questions
I need some advice from everyone.
In trying to transition to an all HD house, there are a few issues that have come up.
We shoot on HDCAM and HDV, 1080i 30. The HDCAM has been great, but it’s just too expensive for the projects we’re going to be starting work on in the next couple of weeks. Enter HDV. We’ve been using HDV and really enjoying it for a year now. However, we’ve been shooting HDV for SD delivery. We need to keep it all HD now.
We currently only have 1 of our G5’s configured with a Decklink card for uncompressed 10-bit HD editing. It works fine, but we need to bring 2 or 3 more workstations into the fold for editing to meet the project deadlines. Outfitting the other G5’s isn’t the problem. The problem is with the Xserve RAID. When we are editing 10-bit uncompressed HD on the one G5, it slows the throughput to the other workstations to a crawl. You can still edit DV material, but you can’t always get smooth playback.
So, we’re looking for some solutions to let us run 3-4 workstations simultaniously off the RAID and still get the job done.
We like the *idea* of natively editing HDV, but are concerned about using it in practice.
The other trouble with going the HDV route, is that we will need to use the occasional upconverted SD material from our extensive library of DigiBeta, Beta SP and DVCAM. We are interested in the new Teranex Mini to do the upconversion to 1080i 30, but we’ve noted that it will only output to HD-SDI. We can lay that down to HDCAM in-house (or capture video directly through the Decklink card), but then we’d need to capture that to something other than HDV. Therefore, we’d need to mix formats on the timeline or convert the footage to HDV after capture and before importing it into the project.
The idea of capturing everything to DVCPROHD is another option. At 100Mbps it would give us the ability to run all 4 machines plus a motion graphics station simultainiously. We could use our AJA HD10A to interface the Sony Z1U directly to the Decklink, using firewire for machine control and TC. We could also capture the HDCAM to DVCPROHD this way. This sounds promising. However, I’ve heard that this codec will not stand up to several generations. Experience dictates that we can probably expect a lot of the video to go through 3 generations with exports/imports with After Effects and all the various versions of the shows we’ll have to produce down the line. International versions, alternate content versions, etc.
Anyone have the experience with DVCPROHD to give me direction on this?
We also have some interest in Photo-JPEG.
Finally, what would be the outcome if we (for kicks) edited everything in either HDV or DVCPROHD and did all the effects and CC, then changed the sequence to, say, 10-bit uncompressed? Would FCP render everything to 10-bit and then apply all the filter settings to that and maintain a higher level of quality then simply leaving it as DVCPROHD or HDV? I’m not looking for a magic bullet here, just if there’s an advantage anywhere.
It’ll be days before I can run some experiments on all of this.
If anyone has some input I’d really appreciate it!I think that’s everything…
Thank you so much.
Jon
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1 Reply
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Jon,
What is the mechanism by which you are sharing the Xserve RAID?
Are you using Xsan or another SAN solution?
Torrey Loomis
President – Silverado Systems
Apple Pro Video VAR
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