HD question

[Jeremy Garchow]

If you have a Varicam, there’s no need for a firestore as you will be shooting tape.

Buy the biggest, fastest, Mac available that suits your needs. Remember that most applications are not universal yet so a MacPro might not be right for you. FCP Studio IS universal so if you are going to be working primarily with FCP Studio a MacPro is cool.

You will need to secure a DVCPRO HD deck for ingest. (a 1200A or similar, perhaps the 1400 if it’s out by then)

I would recommend an AJA HD Kona series card (Choose the one you think you will need based on your computer architecture and the card’s feature set that’s the Kona 2 or 3 or LH/Lhe).

YOu will need storage, SATA is popular, I prefer fibre channel, but it’s more expensive. you can get away with FW800, but I’d opt for something faster and more secure. buy the biggest, fastest, most secure storage you can afford. The Ciprico 4210 is totally awesome and if you can swing it, do it.

You are going to need an HD monitor to watch all of this lovely footage. The Sony PVM L5/1 monitors are great, but they are now discontinued and hard to find. People are having luck with monitoring with the new Panasonic BT-LH series, but they are LCD and not great for critical color evaluation. A CRT is still the way to go and Sony’s BVM line gets pretty expensive.

You are going to need an endless supply of water, tea, chocolate, soy nuts, and dried fruit.

You are going to need a comfortable bed so that when you actually do sleep, you sleep well.

A nice assistant that knows the while entire post workflow process will save your ass more times than you want to admit, and for heaven’s sake, pay that person.

That’s all for now.

Jeremy

[Bronek]

THANK YOU!

If I were to purchase a 2 terrabyte MacPro, would it be hard on the computer to run the operating system on one of the 500 GB drives, and fill the other 3 with footage?

Thanks again,
Bronek

[Jeremy Garchow]

Personally, i don’t know about the speed of the internal MacPro SATA situation and the long term RAID reliability remains to be seen. I do now it looks sweet on paper, but that usually has some downsides.

in my personal experience, storage is not were I skimp. You can a run a slower, cheaper computer, you can not have the greatest most expensive video capture card, you do not HAVE to use an external monitor until you are ready to “finish” the piece, but as soon as a drive goes down and you are in the middle of editing, you can be hosed and will set you back hours/days/weeks depending on how far into the project you are. Trust me, it’s happened to me and it really really sucks.

I know my opinion is of a dooms day scenario, but anyone that tells you different has never had a drive fail in the middle of long project.

2 pennies for ya.

Jeremy

[Chris Borjis]

You don’t need raid at all for Varicam if you edit in DVCPRO-HD right?

It all works over firewire.

[Jeremy Garchow]

At the very least you need a FW800 RAID0 (such as a GRAID). But if you read my comments you’ll see why I think it’s a good idea.

Jeremy

[Kent Kajino]

Depending on the amount of footage, it will make more sense to offline in DV resolution. Storage for 100 hours of DV footage is affordable, but DVCPROHD footage will require way more space (but it’s still only 10% of uncompressed HD – simply amazing to me).
One difficulty with DV is it will be harder to see if the footage is well focused.

After seeing the cost of acquiring and posting from HDCAM or DVCPROHD, I almmost wished I had acquired everything in HDV. HDCAM footage is much much nicer and free of visible artifacts, though. Also much better in low light. Sony FX1, not very good in low light, hard to focus, but it was cheap and small! HDV compression artifacts look quite horrible.

I didn’t pay enough attention to sound acquisition. Very ignorant of me…

Oh and turn off in-camera sharpening or edge enhancement.

and don’t mix DF and NDF timecode. FCP had no problem with them, but it did cause confusion for the operator (guess who) at times.

I should have fired that cam operator kid shooting externals a lot sooner. He kept “forgetting” to use a tripod.

So many mistakes… go on, laugh it up

[Gary Hughes]

I’m not suggesting that you use firewire 800, because I’ve yet to jump into an HD project. However, if you go with a firewire 800 raid, I have both the g-raid 500 and a 500Gb raid drive from Other World Computing at https://www.macsales.com , and there’s very little performance difference between the two, and the OWC enclosure was much less expensive. Now, I buy all my firewire drives from them. They’re fast too. I ordered a drive the other day at 3:00PM eastern and they shipped it the same day. I’m about to add a SATA card to my G5 so I can start using an external SATA raid with swappable bays.

Here’s a link to the OWC raid enclosure. https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/hard-drives/EliteAL/StripedRAID
And here’s one to the G-Raid. https://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-RAID.cfm
Here’s a link to an online store with the G-Raid. https://www.macmall.com/macmall/search/search.asp?search=g-tech&NavID_Search=false&CurDSN=simple&calledfrom=1&incimage=on

According to the Videospace widget from Digital Heaven, assuming that you’re shooting 24p, every 100GB of storage will hold approximately:
12 minutes of Uncompressed 10bit 1920×1080
27 minutes of Uncompressed 10bit 1280×720
16 minutes of Uncompressed 8bit 1920×1080
37 minutes of Uncompressed 8bit 1280×720
2 hours 22 minutes of DVCPROHD 1080i60
4 hours 40 minutes of DVCPROHD 720p60
9 hours 2 minutes of DV/DVCPRO 25

Hope this helps,
Gary