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HDCAM to DVCPRO HD 1080i50 via HD-SDI
Hi,
I’m using FCP 5 on a G5 2ghz, and was considering cutting an HDCAM project on a Blackmagic HD card.
I’ve not done an HD edit before, and my drives are only speced for uncompressed SD – so was looking to use DVCPRO HD 1080i50 as the editing codec. The original footage will be HDCAM 25p.
My machine is pretty old by current standards, so prores and newer FCP is not an option.
Any thoughts on if this will look allright, or other problems I may encounter?
Kind regards,
Scott
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5 Replies
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You can always cut in SD and reconform uncompressed or ProRez elswhere after the offline.
I have been onlining uncompressed HD for two years on a G5 2.5, but with a fibre 4TB sata RAID. I have upgraded to FCS2. At this stage only Color doesn’t work with my hardware setup.
There are other issues to consider too like external HD monitoring. If you have a perfectly good SD setup and a Decklink HD card, you can capture straight from HDCam to SD in DV, uncompressed or MJPEG.
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Hi. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to offline with timecode as I’ll be grabbing the footage right off the camera via SDI – which as far as I know means I won’t have any control/TC.
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http://www.ingeniousfilms.com.au
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[Scott Mills] “I’ll be grabbing the footage right off the camera via SDI”
Personally I think that is madness.
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Rent a JH-3 for the capture. Don’t capture without timecode, it’s just not a good idea at all. Ever.
I’d be inclined to use ProRes for the edit, the data rates are far above uncompressed SD and should be achievable with standard drives without too much trouble. Alternatively even a very basic software RAID-1 stripe will improve your disk performance for faster data rates.
DVCPRO HD is a good format, but it’s pretty highly compressed and can suffer from quite rough compression in the blacks. I don’t think going from the – I think the decompression-recompression cycle from HDCAM to DVCPRO HD could be quite lossy.
My thoughts are largely based on my experience with Avid’s DNxHD codecs, but given it’s similarity to ProRes, I suspect it will be pretty similar there.
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Definitely hire a JH-3.
We have cut at DVCPro HD on a dual 1.8 G5 using v5.1.2 as the lowest spec. Since it is an HD format DVCProHD lets you work in a native HD frame size which saved us conform time when we go uncompressed as fewer of the motion effects needed to be remade.
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