Capturing with Kona LHi From Panasonic HDC-HS700

[Chad Tingle]

[Thomas Kirsch] “When I connect a Sony HDR-FX1, I do get a 1080/60i video signal and capture works great. I am wondering whether there is anything specific I need to do in order to capture video with a Kona LHi card and a Panasonic HDC-Hs700?”

Are you recording to tape or to some type of solid state memory card?.. I believe the HDC-HS700 camera records to AVHD MPEG 4 and you may need to use log and transfer to unwrap the mpeg file and convert it to quicktime instead of capturing through the LHI. Your Sony HDR-FX1 is HDV and records to tape which may explain why you’re able to capture component into your LHI.

Chad Tingle
Producer/Editor

[Jeremy Garchow]

You won’t be able to get 1080p60 out of th HDMi of that camera, and the LHi doesn’t capture 1080p60 via HDMI (only over 3G HDSDI).

As Chad says, you have to do this through file conversion.

Jeremy

[Thomas Kirsch]

Thank you all for your suggestions. The Panasonic HCD-HS700 had the video recorded onto an internal hard drive.
I tried ‘Log and Transfer’ and cannot believe how easy it was to get the files onto my computer in Apple ProRes 422(HQ). I have never had to deal with a camcorder that records on a hard drive or memory card. I have always had to capture video one way or the other from camcorders that recorded on tapes..
When I selected ‘Log and Transfer’ while the camcorder was connected to the computer via USB, Final Cut Pro automatically found the video files. All I had to do was drag and drop them into a bin and they were transferred to whatever I had selected as capture settings.

[Jeremy Garchow]

And that came in as 1080p60?

[Thomas Kirsch]

I was mistaken. The clips I transferred were recorded at 1080/60i AVCHD and transferred to 1080i 29.97 Apple ProRes 422 (HQ). The clips recorded on this camera at 1080/60p did not display (were missing) in the Transfer and Capture Window. When I tried to explicitly open them I got an error message saying that there were some files in an incompatible format. For some reason these 1080/60p AVCHD files (at least in my hands) do not appear to be supported in Final Cut Pro as of now. I am wondering whether anyone else has managed to somehow transfer these kind of files onto a Mac?

[Jeremy Garchow]

Clipwrap.com

[Thomas Kirsch]

I did get the 1080/60p files transferred (to MPEG4 or H.264) using an application called ‘HandBrake. I believe the format of the files is 1080p (not sure) and the frame rate is 59.9 (which was displayed during the transfer). Only the MPEG4 file plays with Quicktime and looks very nice. None of the files import into Final Cut Pro.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Handbrake is limited. You now have to take that file and transcode in compressor.

Try clipwrap.

[Thomas Kirsch]

Thank you Jeremy for your suggestions. I have tried Clipwrap and was able to import the wrapped clips into Final Cut Pro. Playback of the wrapped clips looked good, but after a few seconds could not be handled anymore by my eSata drives.
I also realized that Adobe Premiere Pro let me import and use the clips directly from the camcorder without any further conversion. However in order to play back anything, I have to render. Since I will output on Blu-Ray and plan on using Adobe Encore for that, I will be exploring Adobe Premiere Pro further in order to see whether there are ways to avoid frequent rendering.