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720p and 1080i workflow solutions???
Hey Cows!
So I am gearing up for another season of a show that is to be shot on Varicam 720p. Our dellivery specs will require us to deliver in both 1080i and SD versions. Last time around we were using a AJA Kona 2 card for ingest that gave us DV clips to work with in offline. We want to go DV so we can use external Firewire drives for media storage both for mobility and cost savings.
So my question is about which card is better: Kona 2 (or the newer flavors) or the Decklnk card from Blackmagic?
Keep in mind the following specs I would like to use in my workflow.
– Ingest is 720p Varicam tapes
– Must cut in DV resolution (using multicam feature)
– Prefer to cut at 29.97 and as both SD and 1080i are the delivery specs
– Don’t want to put a card into more than one machine that will be the digitize workhorse.
– We won’t uprez in-house so we don’t need anything beyond a mid-range cardI’m leaning towards the Kona as I have experience with it but I have heard good thngs about the Decklink card and it’s hard to beat the price. Any thoughts?
Thanks Cows!!
Bob -
1 Reply
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Well, there’s all kinda of ways to do this. If i were you, I’d cut in the native format (720p) and then make my down-converts or cross coverts from the 720p master. Hit up Walter Biscardi as he employs this workflow all the time (except I do not know if he does the down-covert). The Kona is great as it’s down-covert is done in hardware and is super great quality, last time I checked the decklink cards could not do 720p24 down-converts and all but one or two of their high end cards were using software downconversion which seemed pretty unusable in a broadcast environment to me. The Kona will take your 720p signal and down-convert it upon capture to SD or take your 720p timeline and downconvert in real time through hardware on the card, but it will not cross convert to 1080 and I’m not sure if decklink will do a cross-convert either. You could always deliver a 720p master to a dub house and have them do the cross-conversion on a teranex. This will yield excellent results.
Jeremy
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