capturing HD Cam footage

[Chris Borjis]

what sort of disk array do you have for this project?

Taking on an HDCAM based project without a capture interface is a little dangerous.

You might need to have it captured for you at a post house.

[Spencer Schilly]

Hey – I don’t know what you mean “disk array”…

I just talked to a rental house and I am going to capture the footage using a Sony HVR-M25U deck… Is this okay?? I am renting it Wednesday. What codec should i use for an offline edit to save drive space??

[Arnie Schlissel]

That is not an HDCam Deck. That’s an HDV deck. Those are totally different tape formats.

[spence77] “Hey – I don’t know what you mean “disk array”…”

Without meaning any offence, I think you may be in a bit over you head if you need to ask this question. A disk array is your main hard drive storage. To work with Pro Res in HD, you need a large, fast disk array. Not as large or as fast as if you’re working with uncompressed HD, but much more “industrial strength” than if you were going to work with DV.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[Spencer Schilly]

great… so i guess back to my original question… what is the best way to get this footage onto my computer so i can edit it?? Should I… 1) down-convert to another format and then bring into my G5 2) bring it to a post house and have them import the footage 3) use a deck that has firewire input/output 4) rent an HDSDI card?

Thanks Arnie… and no offense taken, yes i may be “in over my head” as far as capturing this footage onto my hard drives – that’s why I am asking the experts… but was hired to do this job because sensibility and strengths as a story teller… I have edited 6 features, just never this format… I will be fine once I have the footage captured properly.

[Arnie Schlissel]

Well, there’s nothing wrong with not knowing how to build & set up your own disk array. As long as you can get one that suits your needs, that is.

Assuming that you’re making the offline, start with how much money can you budget for a drive array, then see how much storage that buys you. Once you know that, do you also know approximately how many hours of footage they’ll be shooting? If you can estimate that number, then you can use something like the Aja Data Rate Calculator (https://www.aja.com/ajashare/AJA_Data_Rate_Calculator_v2.app.tar) to estimate how much compression you’ll need to fit that ammount of footage into your drive array. Allow for overhead. I try to calculate on filling up the drives to no more than about 60% full.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[Spencer Schilly]

ok thanks. i am talking to the producer now about their budget. i might just end up editing at a post house because it doesn’t look like my system at home is set up for this. I just have FCP, a G5, a mini-dv deck, and a bunch of hard drives daisy-chained together…

[Arnie Schlissel]

Since you have a G5, you can add a SATA array. You’ll need a SATA card to attach it to the G5, plus the drive array. Look at the adds in this forum from Dulce and Cal Digit. They both have good quality complete solutions at reasonable prices.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[Andy Edwards]

If you are in LA, contact Alpha Dogs and have them digitize the footage for you.

https://www.digitalservicestation.com/

Andy

[Baz Leffler]

Spencer – I hope this helps as we do it all the time here.

We ingest the HDCAM as DV from our Sony JH3 using the built in downconvert.
We then do an offline of the vision and a track layup of the sound. The sound is the same quality as if HDCAM (uncompressed).
When complete we send the sound off to our audio post as OMF and do an online in our HDCAM suite using the off line and master to our HDW1800.
Its that simple (if you have the machines).
In your case you should get a post house to transfer the HDCAM tapes to DV and then you can do the ingest with your own gear and then outsource any of the other stuff I mentioned.
If you were in Sydney Australia I could help you with it all but I am sure there are post houses all around the world that should be able to handle it.
Baz

What would I do without the ‘UNDO’ button!!!!

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

That’s the JH3 (not the GH). You cannot capture HD over Firewire using this deck, the Firewire is for downconverted SD (in the form of DV25) only. If you want to do that, i.e. cut an offline version and later online at a facility equipped for that, that is a very sensible approach. You don’t need to have the downconversions done separately, the JH3 does that conversion for you directly from the HDCam tapes. In fact, that’s what the JH3 was designed for – to be a feeder deck for offline editorial from HDCam original.

Why would you want to convert to ProRes for a standard def offline?