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Need advice working with Panny 900 HD and FCP
So, got my hands on a an HD panny 900 setup yesterday, shooting in Millenium Park.
Shot 1080 /60 24p.We have the camera at the studio now, and are testing how to import the footage from the camera and how to set up the FCP system. Couple questions (okay five questions, I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition):
1: we connected a firewire cable to the camera and the Apple, directly. We opened up the easy setups in FCP and selected DVCProHD firewire, opened a project in the same HD settings as the shot footage, opened the logging and capture window. We got live camera picture, we can press the transport controls on the camera and play back the tape and capture using the “capture now” button. The capture window shows transport controls as for deck controls, which you can press…. but they do nothing: we can’t control the camera transport from the mouse. I can capture on the fly as if a non-controllable device though.
Looking over the switches and menus of the camera, I could not find any obvious switch or menu that let me have remote deck control of the camera over firewire. Then again, the really “helpful” manual for the camera took 120-odd pages to get around to telling me you have to push and HOLD the menu button for 3 seconds to get into the menus that set your HD options, so maybe I need to find the headpiece for the Staff or Ra and wait for the sun to be at the right angle or something to find the settings I need for remote deck control by firewire?:-)
2: Does this camera record only HD, and never any SD? Meaning, could we deliberately use it to shoot in DVCPro25 or DVCPro50 mode? I could find no menus for that, and now I’m wondering if we could do those things when recording to external Firestore. I understand you can get HD tape for it, we just used regular 66-minute DVCPro25 loads, which ran at double speed so the 66 becomes 33. Is there some advantage to the more expensive “HD tape”? We kind of like not having to carry multiple flavors, since we still do a lot of SD work here.
3: Camera monitor-out settings and SD downconversion: I did not have the manual with me in the field and I found the menu switchology for this part non-intuitive, so please help me out: The camera has two BNC monitor output spigots and what I would like for one to be SDI to go to my Portable HD monitor, and the other to be Analog SD anamorphic or letterbox that could be seen on a cheaper and more plentiful analog monitor.
I could not make that happen. I could only seem to get SDI out of both spigots simultaneously. I am doing something wrong, please straighten me out.
5: Back to FCP now. We’re playing with video output settings in the AV menus. What I want to have happen is FCP to send the pix thru the AJA IO and then out as component SD video to a betacam deck and component monitor. We have this going now, but the down-convert that happens on the fly looks really poopy: horrible moire’ effects in detail areas, all manner of ugliness. When I stop the timeline, the picture reverts from full-screen anamorphic look to a still of the HD picture but only one upper corner of the frame shows, though the part you *can* see is nice. Step-framing looks great. Playback in realtime doesn’t.
I get it that I’m asking the machine to cross-convert HD to SD on the fly during playback off the timeline, so maybe my expectations are too high? But really, I expected a gorgeous SD picture with some hit in resolution thrown in.
How we’re planning to work with this stuff:
I want to edit the spot in full HD first, then render out an SD 4:3 letterbox version and a full-screen SD version that will have to be “unsqueezed” by the TV station.
I will want to archive the HD version of the 30-second spot to a DVD as data.Anyone willing to walk me thru the setup details, in depth? Here or offline? We’re seriously looking at buying these cameras but want to get these questions answered first
Thanks!
(cross-posting in related forums because I need the different perspectives on such a multi-disciplinary question) -
1 Reply
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You’re lucky Mark. I’m spanish but I have my Inquisition suit in the laundry today:-)
The “Easy Set Up” set the specs for the sequences of your project, no for the captures.
So whenever you open a new sequence, will be according with the Easy Set-up that you chose.[Mark Suszko] “The capture window shows transport controls as for deck controls, which you can press…. but they do nothing: we can’t control the camera transport from the mouse. I can capture on the fly as if a non-controllable device though.”
With the camera ON and switched through FW:
Go to AUDIO VIDEO SETTING > Capture Presets
– Check the Preset that match your footage.
– Duplicate> Edit. In “Digitizer” you should get the “DVCProHD IN.
That is you Capture Preset.
Still in AUDIO VIDEO SETTING, go to DEVICE CONTROL PRESETS> DVCPro HD FireWire.
Now you should have full control of the camera from FC.I think that the downconverting HD>SD should be good using the AJA or directly in the camera
.[Mark Suszko] “I want to edit the spot in full HD first, then render out an SD 4:3 letterbox version and a full-screen SD version that will have to be “unsqueezed” by the TV station.
I will want to archive the HD version of the 30-second spot to a DVD as data. “
Mark, don’t think now in the SD-4×3-pillar-box etc, etc..
My suggestion is that you try to make the best HD master. From that master you will be able to export all the different sizes or formats that you needs.
Your other questions about HD/SD out I can not answer because I have not a 900 near by.Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17″
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.
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