720p60 23.98 footage to HD Deck

[Izoneguy]

How much stuff is it?? To rent a $1400 per day deck just to have a back-up to tape makes no sense.
You can re-import the P2 card CONTENTS to any MAC. Why go through thr hassle of importing
into your MAC, output to tape and then they are going to re-digitize the tape??
Makes no sense. I could understand if you where completing a show and
needed HDCAM. The future is digital bits & bytes. Say good-bye to the tape deck.

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

Yes, it will do 720/24 to 1080/24. That’s one of the features that make it particularly attractive and distinguish it from the Blackmagic cards. It has a built in, hardware based up and downconverter, allowing simultaneous output of HD and SD. Very flexible.

As for the 720/24/60 thing, what I said was accurate. 720p/60 is the only existing, supported **video** format. 720p/24 only exists in a computer, so yes, the Kona will directly convert that to 1080p/24 on the fly without going through the 24/60/24 cycle.

[Matt Silverman]

To clarify, there are two frame rates for 720p… 60 and 59.94 progressive. There is no interlacing. Our tri-level sync generator only had these two options which is how we first discovered the nightmare called 24p 720p which as mike pointed out does not exist. Everything is being caaptured either 60 or 59.94 on tape, then when captured the metadata is read by FCP and the extra frames are ignored. When played back these frames are added.

Take a 23.98 DVCProHD Sequence and try to feed it into another FCP machine with a 23.98 capture template and you will end up with your picture playing back twice as slow, since the playback is really 59.94.

720p has been the bane of our existence. 1080 is much closer to what we are used to working in NTSC (once you understand pSf is not fps ;-)), and the first format we started with when we did our HD upgrade. We thought we knew what we were doing until along came 24fps 720p

-Matt

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

It’s been the bane of our existence as well, particularly because thanks to Apple, Panasonic, and general hype, too many people think there is actually a 720p/24 video format, when in fact there isn’t. Not only that, they think it’s some kind of “standard,” when in fact it doesn’t even exist.

A better solution for DVCProHD work is to use 1080p/24 – which, ironically enough, doesn’t actually exist either, at least in DVCProHD land. However, both Blackmagic and Aja “cheat” by using the DVCProHD 1080i codec to “fake” it, in much the same way that Sony uses 48i to create a recording format for 24p. The nice thing about using this approach is that it integrates well with the existing video infrastructure, so things like telecine transfers and bouncing to and from tape are simple and conversion free.

Barring that, I highly recommend putting together a system with a Kona 3. It just solves a lot of problems.

[Matt Silverman]

BTW, Panasonic has an FCP Frame Rate convertor plug-in which allows you to manually set the flagged frames (ie. capture 59.94, then later tell it “you are 23.98).

[Matt James]

It’s so nice to have a forum like this, isn’t it!

I REALLY could have used a Kona 3, but the client only has a Kona 2 and an “old” G5, which was the fastest in the world not that long ago. So what I did was I had to up-res all the footage using Compressor, from DVCproHD 920×720 to 1920×1080 24p. Obviously it was huge files sizes so I had to transcode about 15 minutes at a time on one G5 and then bring it to an X-raid on another G5 FCP system, which was hooked to the HD recorder. I had over 5 hours of raw footage that needed to be backed up so you could imagine how fun the processs was. It took me all night long, literally, but it worked out just fine and didn’t look that bad at all! I was impressed with the outcome.

As for the back to tape issue, I have tried. I totally agree that we are all going away from tape and just dealing with data here and there. But this client has plenty of money and is still nervous about keeping a drive on a shelf. So I agreed to do what they wish. I am excited about DVCproHD and using P2 cards. Such a great looking codec for so little space and processing.

I had to help an old client today that had a project that was in DV. Isn’t is funny how bad the image looks in DV when you’re used to working in HD? I can even tell a BIG difference between DV and Beta now; when it was harder to see before experiencing HD images regularly.

Thanks again for all the posts,
Matt James
Freelance FCP Editor
Denver, CO
Peacejames@aol.com

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

>>But this client has plenty of money and is still nervous about keeping a >>drive on a shelf.

I wouldn’t call that being nervous. I would call it being sensible.