720p25 to FCP5 results noisy pictures. Workaoround?

[Itamar Kool]

Well that sounds weird to me. Only thing I have noticed in pans and tilts is that it is kind of jerky sometimes. Which might be because it is progressive or because of the drop frames; we still have to find out about that one. Are your hard disks fast enough?? And the connection with your disks??

Kool En De Anderen
dual 1.8 gig G5/Mac OS 10.3.9/Kona 2/Hugh 800 G diskarray, fibrechannel/FCP 5.02/AE 6.5 Pro
http://www.koolendeanderen.nl

[Romanski]

Hello Itamar

I did another few tests and i’m pretty sure that this was a sync problem and its gone now. What i have now are strange screendesigns from the Kona2, when you switch between 1080i and 720p settings.

There is a problem occuring with the 720p 10Bit UC Setting for Kona Display. When you hit play, it will play in highspeed for a second and then come to a slow and jittery playback. This appears not every time, sometimes it places the 720p picture on the left upper corner of the cinema display and plays the clip at normal speed and full quality.

But at least I saw a clip playing with the handmade 720p25 settings, and I think its what I looked for. The original footage is noisy yet, so we don’t have to blow up the noise to 1080i. Or could it be usefull for color and picture corrections?

Thanks so far for all the tipps.

Roman

[Itamar Kool]

Yes, I had the same play back problems. But somehow they disappeared. When you play the clips in Quick Time they play smoothly, so I figured it wasn’t something serious. I certainly wouldnt blow up your material for color correction!

Kool En De Anderen
dual 1.8 gig G5/Mac OS 10.3.9/Kona 2/Hugh 800 G diskarray, fibrechannel/FCP 5.02/AE 6.5 Pro
http://www.koolendeanderen.nl

[Romanski]

So thank you for all the help. Its weird how many combinations of configurations come along with hd. And thanks to CreativeCow. This forum is very usefull

Roman

[Walter Biscardi]

[Romanski] “I’m digitizing a film who was shot with a varicam 720p25 (for later PAL downconverting) with the kona2 and the AJ1200 over HDSDI. The shots were done in a dark cellar with poor lightning conditions.

As I have been adviced on a HD workshop, the best way to edit the 25p material is to digitize it 10Bit UC for best results on later color corrections and composites. the dp was well shocked as he saw his pictures upconverted from the AJ1200 in 1080i”

The Varicam is not a great camera for low lighting conditions and you will see a lot of noise in darker areas of the screen, especially after it has been recorded to tape. If the D.P. was looking at a feed out of his camera during the shoot, the shots would look cleaner than what you are digitizing because the camera itself is uncompressed. Once the footage is recorded to tape, it’s then DVCPro HD with the resulting compression and added noise. In fact, in low lighting situations, the entire scene will exhibit a lot of noise.

Panasonic is getting ready to release an updated Varicam that addresses this noise issue and from what I’ve been told, the noise has been knocked down considerably. So the noise you’re seeing is most likely recorded to tape that way.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

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G5 Dual 2.0, AJA Kona 2, Medea FCR2X