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P2 with Macs and FCP
I just saw a “demo” of HVX200 at DV Expo East. Jan (Pana rep) said that the Mac Powerbooks cannot see the P2 card as a drive. The PCMCIA cardbus slot is not seen that way by macs. She mentioned some kind of Unix shareware that changes the way the Mac sees the P2 loaded in the PCMCIA slot. How are people using Macs and FCP with P2 cards? Do you have to buy more hardware (like the P2 Drive or P2 Store)?
When you finally do get the files onto your Mac harddrive, what kind of file do they show up as? Regular QuickTime movies in DVCPROHD codec?
What about variable frame rates? Do you have to process them in FCP to change them into the frame rate you are editing in?
My understanding of DVCPROHD captured from tape through firewire is that the varicam and SDX900 always record 60p on the tape, and then divvy up those 60 frames to make the different frame rates of 24p, 30p, and 60i (or something like that). And that process means you have to “remove duplicate frames” when capturing in FCP. Is there anything like this process when editing with DVCPRO50 or DVCPROHD shot on P2 card?
I haven’t worked with DVCPROHD before, so please excuse my ignorance.
massachi
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4 Replies
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On the Varicam, variable frame rates are indeed recorded as 60p on tape. They’re imaged at the appropriate frame rate, and then duplicate frames are created to pad the sequence up to 60p, because that’s what the tape mechanism needs in order to be able to record.
On the P2 card, such gyrations are not necessary at all. It directly records only the frames it needs, so a 30p sequence takes up half as much space as a 60p sequence. Only the 30 frames per second are stored; there are no duplicates.
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Barry,
thanks for the informative response.
With the Varicam, does it also record to tape in 59.94 progressive frames/sec with these frame rates and do a similar flagging:
23.98p
24p
29.97p
30p
60i
60pAre these considered “variable frame rates” or are those more like 4fps, 8fps, 15fps, 48 fps.?
What about when recording 1080? Does the varicam has variable frame rates for 1080?
massachi
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The VariCam doesn’t support 1080 at all, it’s 720p-only.
As for frame rates, the VariCam can record at any frame rate from 4 to 60 frames per second. Any frame rate other than 60 will have some duplicate frames added (and flagged) to “pad” the data stream up to 60, because that’s what the tape needs to receive in order to be able to record it.
The VariCam offers frame rates of 4, 5, 6, 7, … 58, 59, 60 frames per second. Any frame rate from 4 to 60. And you can change the frame rate during a shot, so you can do speed-ramping and things like that.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
[massachi] “She mentioned some kind of Unix shareware that changes the way the Mac sees the P2 loaded in the PCMCIA slot. How are people using Macs and FCP with P2 cards? Do you have to buy more hardware (like the P2 Drive or P2 Store)?”
Here is one thread in this forum that discusses what I was saying.
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=193&postid=851881
Here is a link to the software that I mentioned.
https://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/rsyncx.html
Hope that helps,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems
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