720p25 capture over firewire?

[Michael Gissing]

The Panasonic codec is DVCPro100HD and is designed to be captured over firewire.

To monitor HD it is best to have a card like the Decklink or Kona. Search previous posts also about the Matrox MXO which is an HD monitoring solution.

My limited experience with varicam at 25 fps plus anecdotal stories leads me to be very wary of this format in 25 fps. Perhaps things have been improved recently but I have heard some bad experiences with varicam and 25 frame. It seems that in the 24 frame world, it works as many here will confirm.

I have just finished a varicam job that was shot 23.98 and then the final was sped up to 25 for the BBC. F**ing nightmare for all concerned. I was luckily only doing sound post on that one. I limit my picture post facility to HDV and HDCam.

[Carsten Orlt]

all you need to know (and don’t want to hear):
https://www.aulich-adamski.de/en/perm/panasonic-varicam-720p25-support-in-final-cut-pro

Carsten

[Michael Gissing]

Morning Carsten,

Good link and info. However the final paragraph say “Some additional work might be done for audio conforming”. This is a huge understatement and anyone who is thinking of shooting 23.98 for a 25 frame delivery should talk with their audio post people. It is far from trivial.

It was also interesting to watch the director and editor watching the 25 frame restripe and commenting on just how the 4.01% speed up changed the pace of their edit in a way that they felt was undesirable.

[James Cooper]

Thanks for the info – I guess I have a potential nightmare on my hands! Any thoughts as to whether shooting on the hdx900 would help my chances of cutting in 25fps?

[Carsten Orlt]

James
Read the article again. It is not a nightmare!

Only thing you need to consider is that you can’t really use the the off speed from the Varicam directly in FCP, BUT you can easily if you would go to a facility that has the Panasonic frame converter (forgotten the model number) and would convert any frame to proper 25FPS.

If you shoot only 25Fps all is pretty straight forward.

Now if you do not need off speed you can of course shoot everything with the 900 and then all will be easy.

Think of it this way:
The Varicam is a NTSC frame rate based camera that can shoot 25 because it has variable frame rates. So to work with PAL based frame rates you need to adjust the workflow and how you adjust it depends on what you want.
The HDX 900 is a dual frame rate (NTSC and PAL) camera that works in either, but can’t do any of the of speed rates. Then again it has other features the Varicam doesn’t have, like pre-record buffer.

It all depends and you have to do your research, might do some tests, think about for which markets you want to master etc.

Go the Varicam forum on the cow and you’ll find a million answer to everything re Pal with Varicam/900 etc.

Cheers
Carsten

Carsten

[Carsten Orlt]

Hi Michael

Guess always better to make some tests before committing to this workflow 🙂

What I don’t understand is why it was such a big problem?

I would think you cut in 24, do your sound post in 24, export picture from FCP as 24, change Fps in cinematools to 25, speed up your audio by 104% and all should be fine?

to naive? 🙂

Cheers
Carsten

[Michael Gissing]

[Carsten Orlt] “I would think you cut in 24, do your sound post in 24, export picture from FCP as 24, change Fps in cinematools to 25, speed up your audio by 104% and all should be fine?

to naive? :-)”

Unfortunately yes.

Firstly 23.98 is not 24. Most audio systems can do real 24 but not 23.98. Also we had to cross convert the HD to SD to run with the audio system.

So we went with 29.97 NDF to maintain the real time of the sequence. Audio was imported from an OMFi (this was offlined on an AVID) and the picture came on digi beta.

So far so good as in audio we have a standard sample rate so the OMFi could be imported into a 29.97 sequence and still was in sync. Next tracklay & mix as usual. Then the 23.98 was sped up to 25 for the BBC version. The mix and stems had to be sped up by 4.01%. This figure is not entirely accurate as 23.98 is actually 23.9761ish and getting it right makes a difference in a 90 minute doco.

Not everyone has good software to do this speed up and maintain pitch without introducing audio artefacts. Luckily I do but it is far from typical software in any facility.

So with all that fiddle, the other complication is that I had to switch one of three studios onto a 29.97 video reference to sync audio & picture. All of this is a nuisance to the usual efficient running of a facility, as I had to use a second video reference signal and manually patch it to the machines, bypassing my otherwise efficient signal distribution system.

All this came about because the project required varispeed. Nobody spoke to me before production so I had to solve this issue on a tight turn around relatively low budget program.

The final issue was a reversion for The History Channel where I was presented with a 23.98 EDL to recut a 29.97 sequence. Here Cinema Tools came to the rescue and converted the EDL to 29.97. You may have seen an early Cow post from me about trouble getting Cinema Tools in FCP vers 6 to work. Luckily I have a second system drive with 5.1.4 and its Cinema Tools worked.

Very few facilities would have both the software and technical savvy to make this sort of complicated work around happen without blowing time and budgets.

There must be a way to do decent slo mo in HD without this sort of mess. If anyone out there knows of an alternate to Panasonic Varispeed then I would love to pass that onto the producers to make the next one a bit easier for all concerned.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Michael Gissing] “There must be a way to do decent slo mo in HD without this sort of mess.”

Test test test, but you can always shoot @ 60 or 50 (depending on your camera) and conform the clip to 25 in Cinema Tools.

[Carsten Orlt]

get you point Michael 🙂 Sorry for the mess.

The Solution is the frame rate converter from Panasonic (Panavision Sydney has one)
Shoot in 60HZ on the Varicam and if not shooting 25 convert it via the converter to 25. This way they can either Post in 720p25 (via 720p50) or directly in 1080i25 (50)

And all your post is going to be 25 Fps with the usual Master conversion at the end.

Carsten

[James Cooper]

Many thanks Michael and Carsten for your advice. To boil it down, I guess the overall answer is ‘no’ I cannot capture at 25p without additional hardware – either the Blackmagic or Kona card (according to the article), or Panasonic frame convertor. (So more money for more kit needed!)
As far as the 900 not doing variable speeds – I realise it doesn’t have the flexibility of the varicam but If I simply wish to get a good slomo, I assume I can easily shoot 50fps or possibly 60fps and convert to 25 using FCP frame convertor?
Overall I agree – some test shoots are needed!