making 2hr hdcam deliverables from prores hq – suggestions?

[Gary Adcock]

[Adam Berk] ” I’m entirely new to the world of final cut pro and kona-> we’re a finishing house with flame and smoke.”
FYI – That would be the same Aja hardware in FCP since Autodesk is an Aja OEM.

“This seems like quite a major issue”

I agree and I have not seen that issue in quite awhile and I layoff to SR multiple times on a weekly basis.
I see issues when I switch between PAL and NTSC frame rates, but not between different sequences with the same base settings.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows for the Digitally Inclined
Chicago, IL

https://blogs.creativecow.net/24640

[Shane Ross]

The issue only arises for me when cross converting formats, or frame rates. If I downconvert, I find the offset and then all is fine…it is the same every time. Only converting 720p to 1080p, or 23.98 to 59.94 causes this stuff to happen. And it is understandable, big conversions are taking place.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Adam Berk]

[gary adcock] FYI – That would be the same Aja hardware in FCP since Autodesk is an Aja OEM.

What’s interesting is that I’ve never seen any sort of offset issue like this when laying off from the Autodesk boxes. Although, the only realtime conversions they allow the AJA board to do are pulldown insertion and RGB <-> YCbCr. If you want to do a full resolution down conversion or cross conversion, you must do the output from the Nvidia SDI.

I wonder if Windows users of the Xena, or any other Linux based systems that use the AJA OEM-2k have these offset issues.

Have those of you who’ve seen this offset problem on the Mac had the same issue when using the card with apps other than FCP? For example, AJA’s software, Premiere?

[Adam Berk]

[Shane Ross] And it is understandable, big conversions are taking place.

It may be understandable. I wouldn’t exactly say that it’s acceptable. The less workflow snags we have around the office, the better off we are when trying to deliver top notch, top quality work, creatively and technically, every time.

[Gary Adcock]

[Adam Berk] “What’s interesting is that I’ve never seen any sort of offset issue like this when laying off from the Autodesk boxes.”

hence the comment about the difference in price from Shane. With the Price difference there is traditionally a higher level of technical knowledge, so you understand what is happening when you have to do those kinds of conversions.

One of His issues is specific in DF vs NDF workflow and deliverables in FCP when using 23.98 NDF materials and delivering 29.97/ 60i DF content.

Since you ask most of these issues is not the Kona, but IMHO wholly within FCP and its obvious to people that work with the high level tools that those sorts of issues are treated with greater care when asking for the higher priced turnkey systems.

The other thing you need to think about is workflow- how many differing formats do you work in? It is not uncommon for some of us to have projects from differing sources, rasters and frame rates, something that is no so common in the higher end workflows were all content is conformed into the existing workflow pipeline.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows for the Digitally Inclined
Chicago, IL

https://blogs.creativecow.net/24640

[Mark Spano]

When I was testing KONA 3 for offsets months ago, I found this info and checked it by AJA and they confirmed it. I created a document for my facility and I’ve copied it below. I apologize for conversions that I did not get to, but this should give a good idea what to look out for.

—
KONA 3 Output – Delay Compensation for Video Conversion

When not performing any conversion on resolution or frame rate, the KONA 3 is frame accurate in edit to tape for video and audio.

—
When upconverting (for example, 525i29.97 to 1080i29.97 – only resolution, not changing frame rate) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for audio and 1 frame late for video.

To compensate for this, shift video in sequence earlier by one frame.

When downconverting (for example, 1080i29.97 to 525i29.97 – only resolution, not changing frame rate) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for audio and 1 frame late for video.

To compensate for this, shift video in sequence earlier by one frame.
—

—
When converting (1080sf23.976 to 1080i29.97 – adding pulldown only, not changing resolution) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for both video and audio.
—

—
When crossconverting (720p59.94 to 1080i29.97) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for video and audio is one field early in 29.97i.

When downconverting (720p23.976 to 525i29.97) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for video and audio is one field early in 29.97i.

When crossconverting (720p23.976 to 1080i29.97) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for video and audio is approximately .4 frame early in 29.97i.

The only true solution to compensate for these types of conversions is to do a separate edit for video (at conversion) and audio (with no conversion), since audio can not easily be shifted accurately by less than a frame in FCP. Or open the audio track in Pro Tools and add the delay time to the beginning of the track, consolidate, and export, then import that into FCP and replace the audio in your sequence with your delay-compensated file.
—

[Adam Berk]

Thanks so much for posting that Mark. Super helpful. Thanks for sharing.

[Adam Berk]

[Gary Adcock] The other thing you need to think about is workflow- how many differing formats do you work in? It is not uncommon for some of us to have projects from differing sources, rasters and frame rates, something that is no so common in the higher end workflows were all content is conformed into the existing workflow pipeline.

Hmm. Definitely an interesting thought. Most of what comes our way is usually 1080 23.98psf HDCAM-SR film transfer, though every now and again we see 720p30 used in gaming spots for game capture and animation. This project though is a feature (our first) and it’s entirely 720p23.98 with a few 720p60 cuts that came from mistakes made on set. We’ve only seen one job that was shot R3D. Keeping in mind that we are very new, and very small (just 3 of us full time with 2 suites). We rarely have a job that uses mixed resolutions outside of graphics, screen inserts, and other elements of that sort.

So does the Kona actually handle the number crunching involved with a mixed format sequence in FCP during output? I though FCP does this during final render.