720p60 23.98 footage to HD Deck

[Aaron Neitz]

I don’t think the HDW-500 can accept 720p…. I know you need a special board to output a 720p from a 1080 tape. it’s been awhile since I’ve used one.

on another note… the only official broacast standard 720p format is 720p/60. Even though FCP can deal with 24fps media, you can only technically output 60fps media (basically it just dupes frames like crazy… but since the frame rate is so high, it looks fine to the human eye)…. Even though the Varicam records “24p” it’s still striping the tape at 60fps and putting flags in for the real frames so you can digitize and edit at 24.

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

The only Sony machine that supports 720p is the HDCam SR. The only formats supported by the machine you’re talking about are 1080i/60 and 1080p/24. You will need to convert to one of these two formats. The client will need to specify which one they want.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Peacejames] “I have footage that was shot on a Panasonic HVX to a P2 card. The info that FCP tells me is that the footages’ Compressor is DVCproHD 720p60, frame size is 960×720, but the frame rate is 23.98. How is that 60?”

The codec is “named” 720p60, the frame rate of your media is still 23.98. The HVX can record just the 24 frames, but as the other posters mentioned, the Varicam can only record 60 frames a second which is where the DVCPRO HD codec originally came from, kinda. You want to worry about the frame rate and not the codec. The 720p codec is the same at 24 frames and 60 frames per second.

Jeremy

[Matt James]

That’s what I thought. Even thought the Kona card is able to playback 720 stuff, the HDW-500 Deck can not see anything but 1080.

So I will up-res the footage using Compressor and dump it out that way. Has anyone had a client mention a quality difference in this practice? Obviously changing the frame size will smoosh out the resolution, but how bad is it? I didn’t have time to do any tests before I left. I know they’ll be really happy with me if I can’t transfer the footage to tape with this deck. It was a $1400/day rental.

And when I play the 720p60 footage in the FCP 23.98fps timeline, I am actually seeing the 24 frames, not 60 fields or whatever. And when I play it in the viewer, it shows me all 60 fields, not giving me access to all of them, but it does count differently. That makes up or the time difference in the i/o time window and the location time window in the canvas. It was like an hour off of each other at the end of the timeline!

Thanks a lot for all your help,

Matt James
Freelance FCP Editor
Denver, CO
peacejames@aol.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

So they want a 1080 master? I’d layoff to dvcpro hd (720p) and take it to a dub/post house that has a terranex and do the cross convert there.

[Peacejames] “And when I play the 720p60 footage in the FCP 23.98fps timeline, I am actually seeing the 24 frames, not 60 fields or whatever. And when I play it in the viewer, it shows me all 60 fields, not giving me access to all of them, but it does count differently. That makes up or the time difference in the i/o time window and the location time window in the canvas. It was like an hour off of each other at the end of the timeline!”

I don’t know what you mean by this.

Jeremy

[Shane Ross]

[Mike Most] “The only Sony machine that supports 720p is the HDCam SR”

Incorrect. The HDCAM and D5 also accept a 720p signal. At one point our deliverable was a 720p D5 running at 59.94, which you can output to fine with the use of a capture card. Now our deliverable is 1080p24 at 23.98 on HDCAM, so it will be a bit easier.

I am not familiar with the deck you will be outputting to, but I a sure that thru a use of a capture card such as a Kona 2 or 3 you can convert that signal to one that the deck accepts. The Kona 2 won’t go to 1080 from 720 because it can’t cross convert, but the Kona 3 can.

Or you can simple create a project with the settings you require for output and then drop your footage into that and render. Apple’s render engine is pretty darn good.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

>>Incorrect. The HDCAM and D5 also accept a 720p signal.

I’m not going to get into a pissing match with you, but you need to check your facts. First of all, D5 is a Panasonic format, not Sony. Sony has never made a D5 machine, nor have they ever made a machine to support that physical format. Second, there is no HDCam model that supports 720p, because it’s not part of the HDCam spec. In other words, there is no such thing as 720p HDCam. The only Sony machines that support 720p are the HDCam SR machines. HDCam and HDCam SR are two completely different systems, even if they happen to unfortunately share the “HDCam” part of their names. Support of 720p was one of the main features Sony built into the SR format, specifically because of the general acceptance of D5, and because at least 2 US television networks decided to adopt 720p as their broadcast format. The Sony HDCam line of VTR’s are designated as HDW-xxx machines. The SR machines are designated as SRW-xxx. No HDW machine supports 720p. All SRW machines do.

Do your homework before you claim something is incorrect.

[Matt James]

It’s very confusing, especially to the client. They have a JH3 HD player, but no recorder. And they do not have a DVCproHD deck. This is the first project with that kind of footage. I have the original footage from the P2 cards stored on a firwire drive, but they also want a tape backup, just for backup sake. They will be able to play the footage with their JH3 deck later on if they need to.

Thanks again for the help.

Matt James

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

It’s a little late for this, but…

As far as sequence settings, you should be using the Kona DVCProHD 720/24 easy setup. This will set up a 23.98 timeline, but will set up the card to output this as 720/60p (the only existing 720 video format – in the video world, 720p/24 does not exist). That would be if you want to play back as 720. If you need to play back as 1080/24p, the Kona 3 card does this directly, but you need a newer G5 or possibly a Mac Pro (once the drivers are released, which is imminent) because the Kona 3 is a PCIe card.

As I said, none of this helps you now. Scaling up using either Compressor or Final Cut directly (drop the 720 footage in a 1080/24p timeline, select all the clips in the timeline and choose Modify/Scale to Sequence, then render) should work just fine. You will then be able to play those clips out directly through the Kona2.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Mike Most] “If you need to play back as 1080/24p, the Kona 3 card does this directly,”

You’re saying that the Kona 3 will convert 720p24 to 1080p24? Really? You are sure about this? I know it’ll cross convert, but was unaware of that ability at those framerates. Wouldn’t it be converting 720p60 to 1080p24 or really, 1080i30?