-
Panasonic’s 720p 23.98 – a fake format
-
I meant 24p “720”.
-
[Matt Silverman] “The 720 format just sucks..”
Depends on what you are doing I suppose. Works just fine for me, and a lot of others. What I think is the problem is that the workflow you are attempting doesn’t work…well, that is TOO obvious. Since I haven’t had to go from FCP to a Smoke in any format via outputting tape, I don’t know what to say. Why not export an EDL from FCP and recapture from the source tapes where the flags are intact? Does the Smoke use XML?
[Matt Silverman] “What is Panasonic’s recommended workflow? Blow up your master when capturing? Or work 720 then uprez before laying off?”
I am not sure if they have a recommended workflow, as that format is compatible with many edit systems. In the land of FCP, I edit 720p23.98, color correct it, then output via a Kona 3 upconverting on the fly to 1080p23.98 to D5 or HDCAM (D5 preferred). Then we downconvert that to digibeta for broadcast…the D5 is for archival and dubbing only as 23.98 isn’t a broadcast standard, as far as I know. HD is broadcast at 59.94. Our original delivery specs were 720p59.94…but that changed.
It would be better, of course, to recapture the footage at 8-bit uncompressed (issues with 10-bit linger) and color correct that as you have better compression to deal with, but when you are on a limited budget color correcting the 720p23.98 footage with FCP built in tools works just fine. And I am not the only one on the top row of faces that does this.
But, we deliver for Cable. I am sure Network standards are higher (as are budgets) so the workflow would be different. Most likely recapture at higher resolution and color correct on FCP with Final Touch, or capture on a Smoke, or Symphony…or output 720p to D5 and do tape-to-tape color correction.
ANYWAY…I just think that your workflow isn’t the best, and it obviously isn’t working so you need to figure out another way to do it. Saying that “the 720 format sucks” is a rather broad statement and bordering on the level of the “duh” comment.
I worked on a show that shot 720p on a varicam, offline edited on older Avid meridians, and we tried to online at our usual facility on a Nitris DS, but it didn’t support 720p. So we had to jump thru a LOT of hoops, spend tons of money and finally get something working. We went overbudget by a lot…A LOT. This is one reason I use FCP.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
Aaron,
Because of the comment from your associate, I am out of this discussion,
I choose not to be insulted when I am trying to help someone.gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows -
Two ideas…which may not be what you are looking for.
1. Since you are using a Decklink Card, if you layoff your sequence to tape via SDI, could you not choose to insert a standard 3:2, which I am sure Smoke could recognize and extract quite easily?
2. I don’t know if this is a long format show or what your server space looks like, but if you have the Smoke on a server that you can access from your FCP setup, couldn’t you export a Quicktime movie, staying in the native format and keeping it at the 23.98 frame rate that you cut at (which should yield not too large of a file, since it is DVCPROHD) and just put it up on the server and bring it into Smoke that way? I don’t know about Smoke’s DVCPROHD capabilities, but the codec should read correctly…or you could export an uncompressed image sequence (which I’m sure it can read)…though the file would be pretty huge.
I don’t know if either of these ideas help at all. I also don’t know the answer to how you insert the meta deta onto a tape for extraction later (though I would have thought that FCP did this automatically), but I do know this…there is no way that you are going to be able to lay down a 23.98 onto a DVCPROHD tape without adding some sort of a pulldown. If you don’t want to go the route of doing it the non-tape method that I described above, then I think you are going to have to do what everyone else was saying about laying down to HDCAM or D5 if you want to keep it at 23.98 on the tape.
Best of luck,
Eli -
[Eli Mavros] “1. Since you are using a Decklink Card, if you layoff your sequence to tape via SDI, could you not choose to insert a standard 3:2, which I am sure Smoke could recognize and extract quite easily?”
The problem here is that most of the “standard” 3:2 removal tools are geared toward removing fields out of the jitter frames of material running at 29.97fps. 720p runs at a true 59.94 progressive framerate which means that instead of inserting fields to get to 30fps you duplicate full frames in a 3:2 cadence. The normal NTSC pulldown removal tools can’t deal with this. This is what happens currently when I output via firewire (or SDI for that matter); the material ends up on the tape running at 59.94 with pulldown that’s not easily removed. We could write a tool to be able to handle this which Matt mentioned in an earlier post; but we don’t think we should have to.[Eli Mavros] “…or you could export an uncompressed image sequence (which I’m sure it can read)…though the file would be pretty huge”
In thinking about workarounds for this lil issue, using an image sequence is what we came up with to be able to have an offline reference. The smoke’s support of quicktime isn’t very good and doesn’t include the DVCProHD codec…
[Eli Mavros] “…there is no way that you are going to be able to lay down a 23.98 onto a DVCPROHD tape without adding some sort of a pulldown.”
This is a given; I’m just wanting a way to lay down an edited master or an offline reference to the tape and be able to re-load it at its correct native framerate…this is why I refer to the format as a “fake format”.
I’ve seen some posts in this thread that mention D5 running at 23.98. Is this 720p? Does anyone know how D5 stores 720p @ 23.98? Does it have the same pulldown? What sync signal does the deck require when operating in this mode?
-ao
-
https://forums.creativecow.net/readthread/120/736489/736489?&archive=T
Thanks for the link Jeremy; I read an interesting post from Rune in that thread that said:[ Walter Biscardi ] The 1200A cannot generate the 24p flags itself. I must be fed the 24p feed from the Varicam via HD-SDI for this procedure to work.
…Also, there’s an issue that FCP definitely does not generate the flags, and it’s a huge bug in everything.
–rune
I would really like Steve Mahrer to weigh in here because it really seems like this whole doesn’t currently work like it should when it comes to the finishing process. Does anybody know Steve?
This whole format is only going to get more important to professional post production workflows because all too often the client hires the production company to shoot a project and they are shooting in this format; which is fine….we just need to know the truth when it comes to the metadata encoding on output from the popular systems.
-
What I gathered from that post and from Gary’s recent post before he defected, was that the 1200A is capable of recording the userbit flagged frames (which the post I linked to tells you how to do). Then Gary is saying that you need to either output firewire into the 1200A using FCP 5.1.2 (apparently the flagged frames do get sent out of the firewire with the latest version of FCP), OR if you are going to use HD SDI you need to export a reference movie of FCP and output using the free Kona TV application with a crash record on the 1200A. So, for firewire, make sure the deck is in 1394 mode (Menu #600 and switch to 1394) turn on the user bits in the 1200A (Menu #505 & switch to TC&UB), then lay off out of FCP. For HD SDI, The Menu 505 stays the same and you need to change Menu #600 to HDSDI. I don’t have a deck in house to test right now, so I will leave that part up to you.
Cheers,
Jeremy
-
Finally some specific info! Thanks so much!! I will be testing this over the weekend and will post the results…
cheers mate
ao -
Also, it appears you must set the ext tc in to read the SLTC (Menu 507 (TC SOURCE & set it to SLTC). This part is a guess from re reading that other thread so it might take some finagling. This will probably only be true if you choose the HDSDI/Kona TV method. If you use firewire, it appears that the deck will automatically set up the tc format and read it out of the firewire stream.
Let me know how it goes. If it works, we all will have leaned a little something, whatever it may be.
Jeremy
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up