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1200a surprise
Hi All,
I may be discovering an old item, but thought I would pass it on anyway.
I was capturing from our 1200a the other day some 25fps footage shot with the Varicam, down converted to 25fps SDI through the optional board in the 1200a. I was shuttling through a tape that had some flagged 60fps recorded on it by mistake when I hit the “Capture now” toggle on the log and capture window by mistake. I expected either the deck or FCP /BM to fault, but the footage appeared to be captured without error.
I went back and tried logging a clip and capturing, and whilst the 1200a was reporting a time code mismatch fault, the original Varicam 60fps (flagged for 60fps frame capture when shot) was loading into FCP through the BM card with out a problem at 25fps SDI.
The system setting on the 1200a was set 25/50i, system frequncy at 24/60.
It seems that the SDI 25fps down converter in the 1200a is not looking for the flagged frames, but treating all material as a 25fps pull down from 60fps at all times regardless of what the Varicam was set to crank at.
I thought I would pass this on to see if the NTSC SDI down converter cards available for the 1200 can do the same thing.
I have gone back over many tapes with footage recorded for various frame rates and have discoverd that the down converter will pull 25fps out of any flagged frame rate. The interesting thing is that whilst the 1200 reports time code error faults, FCP is still capable of controlling the deck and performing logged captures.
I hope this is as much a pleasant surprise to people as it was to me.
What this means to me at the moment is that when I shoot with the Varicam a project that is entirley to be 25fps SD, I can shoot at 60fps and not have 25fps artifacting in the veiwfinder, really handy when doing sports. This means that at any given time I can shoot slow motion and 25fps at the same time.
Pretty cool eh! -
1 Reply
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In addition to the post above, the same card in the 1200 does the same job for 24fps down conversion. In a test I did last night I had the Varicam set to flag all frames for shooting at 60 fps, setting the 1200 to 25sd or 24 sd down conversion with this footage resulted in true 25fps or 24fps SD capture into FCP through the BM card even though the Varicam is flagging all 60 frames for 60fps playback. This is all with the 1200 system frequency set to 60/24 hz and setting the system replay to either 25sd or 24sd depending on what setting I’m capturing with in FCP.
In the next week I intend to see if recording material back onto the 1200a in 720@60p and then turning that vision back around through the SD down converter results in usable 25/24fps SD footage.
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