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Advice for HDCam 24P to FCP Indie feature
I recently shot an indie film on the Sony900 at 24p and would like some post workflow advice.
We have FCP 5 on a Dual G5. I just ordered a Kona 2 card for I/O. We’ll be using a Panasonic-ae900 HD projector for HD monitoring along with a Sony 20″ broadcast NTSC for SD. We plan to rent a Sony JH3 to digitize the 32 source tapes over a weekend. We don’t have the $$ to setup an Xserve, so we are forced to digitize at DVCProHD to Lacie FW800 drives. We plan to edit, do color correction and visual fx within FCP/AfterFX and 3Dstudio. When finished, we would rent a HDWF500 deck to master the film back to HD. This would be the master that we would submit to various film festivals.
That’s the plan…in theory. Does this work in reality?
I’ve read many posts here about the limitations of editing in DVCProHD – lossy compression, FX, multi-generation degradation. Honestly, it gets very confusing after a while. We’d love to work entirely in uncompressed-10bit, but just don’t have the $$. I’d appreciate any input from someone who’s been down this road.
Thanks,
Norb
Quantum Productions, Inc. -
5 Replies
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DvcProHD is an excellent hd offline format. Who cares about compression really in the offline stage. I would concentrate on nailing and locking the picture cut then redig from the original masters and then do all your final colour correction and comping in HD 10 bit uncompressed. One word of advice would be to do a capture test with a few clips and make a few cuts in a timeline to make sure all your capture and timeline settings are correct before bring in all tapes. You’ll still need quite a bit of Lacie firewire space though. DvcPro HD at 23.98p at 1080 is about 11.7 megs a second, that’s about just over 42 gigs for one hour of running time. Remember that you can not transcode to dvc pro hd 720p out of the deck or with the Kona 2 card. The HDCam SR decks can do this. That would cut your space down to about half as much. On a film I’m cutting now from the same source material I decided to offline in SD DV 50 at 23.98. That’s about 20 gigs an hour. Ya it’s not hd but it works great for offline. Just make sure you work out the anamorphic monitoring thing.
Cheers
and Good LuckPeter McAuley
Axyz Edit
Toronto
G5 dual 2.0
4 gigs ram
10.4.3
FCP 5.03
QT 7.03
Kona 2 v1.1.4 with K Box
4 X 250 gig external F800 Lacie firewire drive
2 X 23″ Apple cinema display -
Peter,
Thanks for your tips. You said I “can not transcode to dvc pro hd 720p out of the deck or with the Kona 2 card.” Does that mean that I CAN digitize to DVCProHD 1080 from the JH3 HDCam deck, just not 720p?
Norb
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Yes that is correct, except you are chewing up about 42 gigs for one hour of material.
Peter McAuley
Axyz Edit
Toronto
G5 dual 2.0
4 gigs ram
10.4.3
FCP 5.03
QT 7.03
Kona 2 v1.1.4 with K Box
4 X 250 gig external F800 Lacie firewire drive
2 X 23″ Apple cinema display -
Peter,
In FCP, what would the Capture/Sequence settings be?
1280×1080, HD (1280×1080) (16×9) at 23.98 or
1920×1080, HDTV 1080i (16×9)?The 900 shoots at 1920×1080 on HDCam, but I’ve read on the forum to use 1280×1080.
Norb
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[NorbCC] “The 900 shoots at 1920×1080 on HDCam, but I’ve read on the forum to use 1280×1080. “
that is the compression ratio of the DVCPROHD under 1080.
You really need to hire someone that you trust and is qualified to set up your system. OR at the very least someone to guide you through the pitfalls of working in HD. The hardware needs if you make a mistake can be daunting.Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA
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