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Capturing tapes vs Firestore
I’m just finishing a large project that was shot on DVCAM HD. Almost everything was captured from the tapes through Kona 3. A small amount of material was imported directly from Firestore. As expected, they look the same to me. My question: Is there any technical or aesthetic reason not to use Firestore as my primary source option (with tapes kept as a backup)?
If I can avoid the step of capturing tapes I can avoid the pretty high rental fees for an HD deck. I know I can’t work in Pro Res 422 if I import Firestore data but, frankly, I haven’t seen any great benefit in Pro Res. My 8 bit material from tape doesn’t look any better when it gets imported as 10 bit Pro Res, of course. (I know…graphics-heavy productions would be better in Pro Res.)
Am I missing something? Or is my preferred option of Firestore workflow as good as any other?
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6 Replies
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The beauty of tapeless is no deck rental, and faster injest of footage.
The drawback to tapeless is the need for solid archiving options…which can be expensive. I use hard drives for backing up, until the rock solid options lower their prices.
Shane
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Hi Shane,
We are shooting tape concurrently with the recording to Firestore and so those field tapes are my archive.
It’s duplicative, of course. But that’s a small price to pay for having archives.
Thanks.
Ron
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What camera are you using. You listed DVCAM HD, did you mean DVCProHD for a Panasonic camera?
I only have a HVX so I have no tape option for HD but I would love to be shooting both, having the tape as a backup would be great, you would be getting the best of both worlds. The one thing I would do is to figure out a recapture from tapes workflow after editing with the Firestore footage. If you had the camera’ TC set on free run and set the firestore to ext TC I would think there would not be a problem. The one area to keep in mind would be if you were taking advantage of the pre-record feature on the FS, you might end up using footage that is not on the tape.
The major benefit as you stated of capturing a tape is the flexibility of codec choice but if you like DVCProHD the cost savings will add up quickly.
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Thanks for catching my brain hiccup. I did mean DVCPRO HD. I agree with everything else you said, too, Michael. I’m not the cameraman but I believe I’ve been told that in order for the tape timecode to match the Firestore timecode you do have to be rolling free-run. BTW, he is shooting the HDX 900.
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I don’t know how you are attaching the Firestore to your camera for recording, (Firewire, HDSDI?) but you should be able to sync the timecode without any problems. I don’t have my camera with me right now so I can’t give you the setup, but there is a menu setting in the Firestore that will set it up to slave and regen the timecode from the camera and the resulting files will have the same code as the clips on the tape. I’ve been shooting with a Firestore for almost four years now (early adopter!) and I always use the QT files from the Firestore for editing and the tapes for backup. Never had a problem yet.
Check the menu settings on the Firestore. You shouldn’t need to shoot time of day code in order to get matching code on the files. TOD code is just dangerous in many situations. Aviod it if possible.
Tom -
Thanks very much! I’m sending your email to my cameraman. (If he has a question I’ll come back with it, if you don’t mind.)
Cheers,
Lee
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