Considering Kona2 for movie online — HDCAM quality questions.

[John Ladle]

it’s actually a very easy program

[Tony]

I would not blame the crew as I doubt they had made the stupid decision to mix the two unsimilar formats and cameras in the first place.

This mistake was reserved for someone way up the food chain who need to step up to the plate and accept the mess they created.

Tony Salgado

[Tpix]

No this is not just a shameless plug for my 3 month old LH & KBox bought to do one 1920x1080i60 HD project, and now available on ebay here with the full balance of the three year warranty transfering to the purchaser:

https://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7586490858&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1

🙂

I was faced with a one-off HD 1920x1080i60 for broadcast long form documentary that had footage shot on DV, DVCam, XDCam, HDV, and HDCam. It also had Betacam SP stock footage. The producers were very worried about how it would all look when put together, and had concerns with broadcaster acceptance.

Although there are some other differences, the choice of LH or Kona 2 came down to two issues:
1-The Kona 2 could do upconvert, but not analog component HD, which is the best picture you’re gonna get out of HDV originals.
2-The Kona LH could not do upconvert but could do analog component HD avoiding the “issue” of HDV altogether.

The decision to go LH was made because:
1- all advice said that the Kona 2 upconvert gave varying results, sometimes great and sometimes perhaps not acceptable. It was suggested by all my research that way to go for a no compromise upconvert was the Teranex. Teranex was what we ultimately used for all of the SD material
2-the 12 bit analog component HD out of the camera kicked the crap out of the HDV out.

Rendering an upconvert in FCP did not have good results. Oddly, also rendering a downconvert in FCP did not have good results. The hardware downconvert in the LH was great.

The Online…

The program was treated as two separate onlines. The first was done on all of the SD material, leaving blacks for the HD material and handles for effects on the SD material. This was colour (Canadian spelling eh!) corrected and conformed in SD 10 bit uncompressed, put to Digital Betacam via SDI, and sent for Teranex to be upconverted to HDCam.

The Teranex worked great. The settings are done shot by shot with the settings based on the technicians interpretation of the footage. The upconvert is then done in real time after all of the settings are done. Allow 1.5x against your total showtime for your booking. For now, Teranex seems to be the undisputed champ of upconvert.

Once this was done the HD part of the job moved forward. The HDCam material was digitized via SDI. The HDV material was digitized via component HD, and the Teranex material was recorded in from HDCam via SDI with the timecodes of the Teranex(ed) material already matching the master program timecodes, No muss no fuss.

It was surprising how well the HDV original performed when digitized analog component. Using this method the footage was indistinguishable from the 8 bit HDCam. Most of the material in this show was fairly static, so the HDV recording codec was not under much load motion-wise – so it wasn’t a definitive test. Anyways, the results I saw certainly wouldn’t have me jumping out to get an HDCam for $50k more over HDV for 1080i60 work.

Drives, 8 or 10 bit.

I did the colour correct, and prefer to work in 10 bit. I feel the difference is huge, especially if you have to blow anything up. Everything holds up better and the shading is much richer. Even though the delivery was 8 bit HDCam, I digitized all in 10 bit uncompressed 1080i60 for the colour correction and HD conform. If your show is going to be a film print one day, then I would definitely go 10 bit.

I was able to digitize and work fully in 10 bit uncompressed on an 8×400 drive SATA RAID with a dual 2.7 and 6Gb RAM. I used two Sonnet SATA controllers. The slot configuration was: LH nearest the video card, with the two SATA controllers in the next two slots. The slot farthest from the video card is the fastest one. The 8×400 drive RAID had 4 drives striped RAID0 across the two controllers. I had a second 4×400 RAID set up for bouncing renders. 12×400 in all It all worked great.

I was not, however, able to output 1080i60 10-bit Uncompressed on this RAID. It was not quite fast enough, and adding drives to the RAID did not help.

The RAID did handle an 8-bit 1080i60 uncompressed output which is all that was required for HDCam work anyway and everybody said “spectacular” when they saw the finished show.

If the output had been to HDCam SR, which is 10 bit, I would have had to have a faster RAID . I also could have sent the entire finished program (around 600 Gigs for 10 bit 1080i as a Quicktime movie on a hard drive for output.

My experience with this would make me hesitant to believe a 5 drive SATA RAID would work well for uncompressed HD (1920x1080i60). I don’t think any 7200rpm five drive raid could do it, no matter how much bandwidth on the host card(s).

If you don’t want any nasty suprises at the end, the best way to practically test a RAID is to fill up your drives with media, make a big sequence, turn of mirror video on desktop, and do a test print to tape at full quality. If FCP won’t do it the RAID isn’t fast enough.

In the end, this show worked out great, and everybody was very happy. It pretty much went as planned.

I think there’s some nuggets in there for you…and good luck with it!

PS. the only reason I’m selling the LH is because I have an io and won’t be seeing another HD project until perhaps late in the year…the LH worked great!
There’s also the RAID and a Final Touch SD available listed with the same seller.

https://search.ebay.ca/_W0QQsassZliz8954QQhtZ-1

[Mugwump]

So if the project is a mix of 720P and HDCAM at 24P, I’m wondering how the conversion would work. Out from the computer, through the Teranex and directly into the mastering deck, or would I have to recapture all of the 720P tapes again through the Teranex? That would be gnarly. We’re looking at a final 24P HDCAM master to eventually print to film.

Which Teranex product, and where is it purchased from?

Thanks for all of your experience with these issues, it’s a lot to chew on and will affect any mastering outputs.

[Tpix]

I would…

Do all of the 720p material first as a separate online, and master it to tape at 720p (leave handles for the effects and leave blacks where the hdcam stuff will go).

Take 720p tape to a post house with Teranex and have them take it to HDCam for you. Then do a final online with your all HDCam material including the new material on HDCam converted by the teranex.

Teranex is in the $100k plus range and there are various levels – so I don’t think you want to buy one. It is a hardware and software package.

The price is about 600-800 hour at post houses for the Teranex and you should budget for 1.5 times your program time.

If you want to know more about Teranex they are on the web.

[Gary Adcock]

[tPIX] “Teranex is in the $100k plus range and there are various levels – so I don’t think you want to buy one. It is a hardware and software package. “

Tpix– note too that the new Teranex Mini offers all of this for about $8K. THe Mini units started shipping late last year and the top of the line mini unit offers Up, Down, and cross conversion in addition to the noise reduction features.

Not everything is in the tool kit as the big one. but certainly more affordable now. I am testing a eval unit now and it looks great.

https://teranexlive.dimentians.com/home/platforms/Mini.cfm

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA

[Tpix]

Looking forward to hearing the results! 8k is a big improvement over 100k if it does a good job. Would love to hear about the K3 upconvert, if it is any better…