first time working with lots of DVCPRO50 24p material, anyone have advice, pitfalls?

[Aaron Neitz]

it works fine. any firewire drive will be fast enough….DV50 at 24fps is about 5.5 MB/sec. you might not have much RT at all with the spec of your machine, but normal editing will be fine.

[Stevesherrick]

I was able to edit some SDX900 footage that was shot 24P and did edit it with a firewire drive. I’m trying to move away from firewire as my main storage solution but it did work. It should be enough throughput for the DVCPRO50 and if you edit in a 24P timeline you are asking the drives to play back less frames so it takes some of the stress of them. I have the same setup as you, although I don’t have as much RAM. How did you get 3GB of RAM in your Dual 1ghz? Is it not a Quicksilver 2002 model. Those can only go up to 1.5gb which is what I have.

Steve

[Paul Harb]

lol, my bad, it is 1.5 gigs….Ive been stalling and stalling to update this suite…..its almost time and Im wondering if this is the time for this project just for the multicam editing….but then I really have to upgrade the computer as well as the program…the director was saying we could offline it, and I was like why??? He was shocked that I suggested we edit at full rez….why would you offline DVCPRO50 footage if you have the storage, doesnt makes sense to me…..so you would capture this at DVCPRO50 24p and edit in that timeline…only thing is I guess I need that Panny DVCPRO50 deck if I want to see the full rez on my NTSC monitor right? I have a KonaSD card, which will output DVCPRO50 to NTSC but not at full rez, it compresses the heck out of it…..

[Stevesherrick]

You may run into some RT performance issues if you do several streams of video, but I think you’ll be fine. I can’t see a reason why you would need to offline this. I’m not familiar with the Kona SD card so I can’t say why you would be having problems outputting. I know the Kona 2 and the LS can handle DVCPRO50 fine.

Steve

[Ron Thompson]

Hey Paul
DVCPRO50/24p is beautiful to work with. The show I cut here is shot on that format with the 900.
One thing I noticed, SDI will give you a more reliable picture. During my initial tests almost a year ago, I noticed some weird pixel shifts in the picture when footage was captured over firwire. SDI was much cleaner with no errors.

This was FCP4.5 and QT6…so things might be different now with FCP5 and QT7, but I’ve been capturing SDI ever since.
Just a headz up for you.

Ron
FCP5,QT7,Cinewave,MedeaRT,RTR, and HMV1200, a bunch of LaCie drives.

[Ron Thompson]

Also, don’t quote me technically, but the SDX900 records 30 frames, not 24 frames, so you would still capture normally.
That was my big question when I started working with 24p and the Panny cameras. You don’t have to worry about Cinema Tools or changing your workflow to 24fps, pull-downs abd all that stuff. Of course you should check the tapes or talk to your DP before you start.

Enjoy
Ron

[Stevesherrick]

Well, that depends on his delivery format. If for SD broadcast, he may well elect to capture it at 29.97, but if he is looking to do an HD out, progressive DVD, etc. he may elect to capture it and remove the pulldown (if he used 24P advanced mode)and then edit it in a 24P sequence. He will see some performance gained by editing this way, although when outputting to a monitor it needs to do the pulldown, so you dop take a hit there. But editing should pose no problems.

Steve

[Aaron Neitz]

Your Kona SD can easily output DV50 full raster – make sure your RT settings are on High (sounds like you’re seeing what happens when it’s on Medium). I have the same Kona (albeit on a G5 system), and we use DV50 all the time – it holds up extremely well compared to full uncompressed.