720p25 capture over firewire?

[Itamar Kool]

I think you need the Kona card. The Kona sees all the duplicate frames and throws them away when you capture. That way you don’t need a frame rate converter. You only capture the frames you want and if you shoot with the Varicam at 25 fps and you have your capture settings set prperly, you don’t have a problem. I have done that several times.

Kool En De Anderen
MAC Pro 8 core/Kona LHe/Apple FCS 2/Adobe PPCS3/Huge fibrechannel
http://www.koolendeanderen.nl

[Jeremy Garchow]

A Kona card (or ioHD) is in order. It will really make your life easier if shooting on Varicam with VFRs. Real time transcoding of off-speed material to other HD codecs, not just DVCPro HD is a very valuable feature.

Do not get the expensive Panasonic frame rate converter. There are cheaper ways to do it.

[James Cooper] “As far as the 900 not doing variable speeds – I realize 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? “

Yes, you will be locked to that speed of slow. You can use Cinema Tools for this conversion as I said earlier. Couldn’t be more simple. Adjust shutter (blur) to taste, shoot 50 (or 60) capture at 50 (or 60). I then duplicate those files and conform the duplicates to 25 in Cinema Tools.

If you decide Varicam and need the offspeed frame rates, it’d be best to buy something from AJA.

Jeremy

[Trevor Asquerthian]

Good practice to shoot the off-speed material on separate tapes from the 25fps material.

Frame rate of recording is recorded in user bits.

I recently got a per-tape quote of £120-240 for 30min HD varicam @ 60fps -> 72 min SD Digi @ 25fps via Panasonic Frame Rate Convertor.

I haven’t tried capture via Kona or firewire. I understand there are issues getting FCP to control a 60Hz deck in a PAL project, also that the firewire option doesn’t use the CineGamma curves that the Varicam Deck applies on Baseband output (i.e. you need to do your own colour correction to get the VariCam look).

The FCP software FRC may, or may not, work – I’ve read differing opinions on this.

It is possible, I believe, to get the Sony HD Cameras to record at 50fps then playback at 25fps.

HTH

Trevor

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Trevor Asquerthian] “Good practice to shoot the off-speed material on separate tapes from the 25fps material. “

Great point to bring up. It’s also best to leave a bunch of heads and tails for the off speed shots as well. More than your normal 5 seconds. Also, slating the shots is good as well just to give us editors an idea of what to look for. I try and tell DPs that I work with that are shooting offspeed to hold a piece of paper with the frame rate written on it and shoot that before the take (even though I can see it in the control panel) just so that I know what’s going on when capturing. That way the shot is slated and I have my preroll. Sometimes the control panel is hidden behind FCP and if there’s a change I might miss it.

James, I have have some recent offspeed footage for you if you want to take a look of footage that was shot with an HPX2000. It is similar to the HDX900 in that it doesn’t handle VFRs like the other Panasonic cameras. I captured the footage live on set with an ioHD @ 720p23.976 ProResHQ. We had to capture a few offspeed shots which we did be turning the camera to record @ 59.94, I captured @ 59.94 and conformed in Cinema Tools to 23.976. I know it’s not the frame rates you are working in, but you will get a sense of the slomo we got out of it if you are at all interested and the workflow would pretty much translate to what you need to do , you would just be capturing off of tape and have a few different frame numbers to deal with.

Jeremy

[James Cooper]

Thanks a lot for your help Jeremy – much appreciated. Is the footage online anywhere to view?

[Jeremy Garchow]

I can make it available to you.

Write me @ editstation at gmail dot com.

Tomorrow is a bad day, but Thursday I can get something up to you.

Jeremy

[Dylan Reeve]

Hey James,

I’m a bit late into this – but here is my feedback from considerble experience.

It is not practically possible to capture 720p25 from Varicam over Firewire into FCP (or Avid). This is because the Varicam system is a 59.94/60Hz system and recording 25fps on the Varicam is basically recording an ‘offspeed’ rate on 720p60. This means to play the tape the deck needs to be operating at 60Hz and FCP will not communicate with it for a 25fps capture.

The most manageable work around is to capture the footage as 24fps and then use the Reconform Rate option of Cinetools to make it 25fps footage, which works fine – but there will be no usable timecode relationship to the original tape, so a recapture will be very painful.

If shooting Varicam there is really only one viable option and that is to use a direct IO like DeckLink or AJA cards. The Panasonic AJ-HD1400 has a ’25(HD)’ mode that is designed to play back the 25fps Varicam footage, but it plays it 1080i50 (not 720p). And rates other than 25fps are still problematic. They can be captured with the AJA or DeckLink cards, but the timecode reference is again lost. In our workflow we capture the footage and then output it to tape again at 720p50 (it’s a loss of a ‘generation’ but makes the edit restorable)

Shooting on the HDX900 will be a lot less painful, in that it records on 720p50 base, so it works in a fairly straight forward way. It lacks the variable motion obviously, but you do that the option of a 50fps mode which you can retime to 25fps later.

I have a love/hate relationship with Varicam as a format. It’s good and and versatile, but it really doesn’t sit well with PAL frame rates.

[James Cooper]

That is brilliant Dylan, and very helpful – thinking HDX900 is the way to go. I really appreciate your advice!

[Tod Elkins]

Side message to this one, but you folks seem to know the general gist: I have a project that (I think) will be coming to me as a finished piece at either 29.97 or 23.98 (client’s not sure), 720p, NTSC. My “simple task” – it’s a favor, basically – is to convert it to 720p PAL, which if I’m understanding correctly is just 1280×720, 25 fps. Actually, I then have to put it out to a piece of PAL HD tape, but I’m going to send that out.

So – simple Q – can I use QT Pro to transcode? If that’s not good enough, can I import it into my AVID, force the 720p 25, then export to quicktime? Or is there a more accurate tool for the transcode that’s relatively inexpensive?

For now – AVID MC Mac 4.0.5, Mac Pro, OS 10.5.8 (Upgrading to MC 5 and 10.6.x next week).

Thanks,

Todus

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Tod Elkins] “which if I’m understanding correctly is just 1280×720, 25 fps. “

Technically, SMPTE standard is 720p50, but you can make a 25p movie and output that to tape as the capture card/FCP will add the proper pulldown on output. Just like 720p24 doesn’t exist to SMPTE, just 720p60.

[Tod Elkins] “So – simple Q – can I use QT Pro to transcode?”

I wouldn’t. It won’t handle the frames properly.

I know you say Avid, but so you own FCS? COmpressor can handle this task for you if you don’t want to send out for hardware standards conversion.

Jeremy