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24p output to DVCProHD–field order/cadence issues
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It gets messy real fast.
The deck CAN accept DF, it’s FCP that cannot.
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And yet it was FCP that wouldn’t accept a NDF value to start blacking the tape…
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That’s because in the edit to tape window it is using rs-422 to communicate with the deck, and it was reading DF.
More accurately, FCP handles DF and NDF, it just won’t let you set your timeline to DF in 720p which makes timing a bit of a pain. Then, if you are in a 23.98 timeline, oh boy.
Jeremy
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Which is interesting since I was using raw tape. But I suppose once FCP thought it saw the DF flag my goose was cooked. I could have blacked from the front panel, but I wasn’t familiar with the deck.
Next time.
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If your 1400 has the Firewire option, use it. No question about it. I can’t tell you how much better off you’ll be. Actually, I can…
First of all, with firewire the deck will read the TC from the firwire instead of the RS232. Even if you do a crash record. No calibration necessary, no pulldown to worry about, etc. A much better way to go. Basically, it will be just like recording a 24p tape. It actually records 60p with regular 30fps NDFTC – but it flags the redundant frames. What this means is the when you or the finishing house plays back that tape over SDI, it will contain a perfectly clean 3:2 cadence no matter what. It also gives the finishing house the (preferred) option to capture natively as well. They can capture firewire or SDTI (an option available on Avids using the Panasonic 1700 deck). So the finishing house can grab it in native 24p.
On top of that, you haven’t color corrected it in FCP. That tells me that most of your video did not require any rendering. That being the case, you will take a quality hit if you use the Kona/SDI in favor of Firewire. By outputting SDI to the deck, you are decoding and re-encoding the lossy DVCProHD codec for the entire piece. And for no reason. But if you use firewire, only the effects which required rendering will be lossy. Everything else is a 1:1 copy.
Look at it this way. The video is shot and recorded to DVCProHD by the camera (quality hit #1). I’m guessing you captured it using the Kona (hit #2). You now decide to ignore my advice (or don’t have the FW option) and ouput to tape using SDI (hit #3). The finishing house is clueless (or careless) and they don’t use firewire or SDTI either. So they capture using regular SDI to the DVCProHD codec (hit #4) . Then when they are done color correcting they master it back to DVCProHD tape (hit #5). That’s 5 generation losses, even though 3 of them are totally unecessary. Just something to think about. DVCProHD is not Digibeta. You can’t run it through multiple generations like that without doing damage.
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Hey Sean
It’s not quite as bad as that. We ingested using Firewire, and the finsihing house will be using Symphony and working in a bigger colorspace. I would have advocated outputting to firewire, but I though I saw in my reading around that FW didn’t make frame accurate edits, and I wasn’t clear that the deck would take the external timecode.
Thanks for your insight and info.
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I think Sean mentioned this earlier in the thread, but as it turns out the easiest and best way was to simply export a Quicktime movie at the current settings. The Avid took it in without any problems and the cadence issue disappeared. Fast, easy, excellent result.
The show is still :06 over because we were editing in an NDF sequence, the only kind available at 24p in FCP.
The more you know…
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