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injesting DVCPRO HD
I’ve rented a Panasonic AJ-HD1200Ap to injest some footage shot on a Varicam. I believe it is 720 60p.
All the footage was shot in a Chromakey studio so I will be doing most of my work on this footage in After Effects CS3. Final project will be HD 720 30p.
Should I use the SDI output or the firewire and why.
My only HD experience so far has been with P2 cards. -
6 Replies
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I do a lot of chromakey work. Depending on how good the shoot is , lighting, exposure, etc, you MAY get a better result injesting via the SDI. The reason, There is a conversion going on albeit digital from the native digital format on the tape to HD SDI. This CAN result in some smoothing that will help you in keying. Now I emphasized MAY and CAN these are always subjective. I will often try a small clip in the native dvcpro codec first, after all it takes up less HD space. If that proves to be troublesome around the edges then I will ingest a clip through HDSDI. Of course the best way to do this is to take a system into the studio and record straight off of the camera HDSDI.
Kevin
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Well, choosing a format seems to be less of an issue since I’m having trouble capturing anything.
I first tried the firewire connection and I got deck control but am not capturing anything, which doesn’t make any sense.It just says “can’t activate recorder” in the capure window.
So I tried SDI and after a little fiddlin around was eventually able to capture. But after I closed Premiere and re-opened the same project I can’t get deck control through SDI. It always comes up in “camera mode” which allows me to record on the fly by hitting play on the deck, then the record button on the capture window. Not ideal.
I’m assuming there may be settings on the deck I am missing? -
John,
There is almost certainly a switch somewhere on that deck that changes it from Remote mode to manual mode. If you want to controll it with the RS422 cable on the XENA board, it needs to be in that remote mode.
I have not specifically used that deck before, so I cant speak intelligently about where that switch is, but basically almost all decks have them.
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I was able to get it to work by attaching a RS422 cable and synching from that.
Out of curiousity, is there an alternate way? -
No, there is no control protocol on SDI, like there is on firewire, you have to use RS-422.
AJA XENA Support
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We have that same deck, and we’ve NEVER been able to ingest anything from the Firewire port. In fact, on some machines, the deck never registers when plugged-into a Firewire port.
We grab everything over SDI or HDSDI from that deck.
—
James Orlowski
RYNO Production, Inc.
http://www.rynoproduction.com
800-860-7966
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