PC for HD with Adobe Production Studio 2 or FinalCut Pro with Decklink HD PRO 4:4:4 and PanasonicAG-HVX200

[Charlie Steiner]

check out the Dell 670…

[Starcorp]

i am afraid that your storage solution will not match the hd requirements. try two fw800 adapter with software raide 0, or go for scsi with the same combination. jan

[Steve Freebairn]

First off, I’m curious why you are getting a 4:4:4 capture card for a 4:2:2 camera that doesn’t need to be digitized. Is it just for Playback? 4 250s in raid 0 is plenty fast enough to playback DVCPROHD footage, which is 100mbit/sec. Do the monitors that you are getting do 1080P (1920×1080) 8 Gigs of ram is great, but at about 4gbs you’re going to hit windows limit and then the other 4gbs won’t be as useful. These are the things that you need for the HVX200 to work with the Production studio

1. the camera
2. Raylight (https://dvfilm.com/raylight/index.htm)
3 your editing system

The editing system you have described sounds great. Why are you so concerned with 4:4:4, are you capturing off of a Telecine machine? or a XL H1? or a viper?

If you wanted to monitor your footage on an lcd, I’d suggest getting a blackmagic card and the HDlink and then hooking it to a dell 24inch 2405 (or 2407 if you wait a few more days) monitor. The dell does have component inputs on it, but supposedly you get better looking results if you use the sdi to DVI hdlink adapter.

Have you used PCs or Macs for previous jobs? I would think that would help you answer whether you need a mac or not. The pc can do it just fine, if not better, depending on what your project involves. Do you need AE, Photoshop, and Encore, and Audition to all play together nicely with Premiere? Then I’d use a PC, (although the mac can play together nicely, I’d prefer the PC because of price) if it was just for editing and money was no object, then I might get a quad core mac, but I wouldn’t switch platforms unless you have to.

[Troy Murison]

The above postings all bring up good points. Another point is that if you
are planning to use the variable frame rate recording capabilities of the HVX200
then PPro/Adobe does not offer a solution as of yet. FCP does via a plug-in
which allows the flags in the user-bits to be read and the appropriate frames
to be discarded after a capture via firewire. Then you edit natively in the DVCProHD
codec at whatever frame rate you’d like (24 or 30) with the over or under cranked
material playing back properly. Adobe doesn’t offer this kind of a workflow yet.
There are a couple of hardware solutions that will get you into the variable frame
rate workflow w/PPro, but not from BM or AJA. Matrox and Leitch offer solutions,
though the Matrox is not currently reading the flags for variable speeds.
They are also uncompressed, compressed with their own codecs or native
DVCProHD. If you don’t care about the variable frame rates for now, PPro w/the
appropriate hardware buffer card could work well. You just need to account for
mainly the drive speed as these solutions are all working with very high data
rates vs. the native DVCProHD’s pretty mild rate. The drive config you mentioned
will not keep up with either 4:2:2 or especially 4:4:4 HD as noted above
by others. It should be more than fine for native DVCProHD.

So, if you indeed want to use the variable frame rates offered by the camera, FCP/
Mac may be the way to go. The Mac will cost more, but you’ll save by not having
to buy the expensive arrays needed to do uncompressed HD plus you’ll have the option
of using the Varicam to it’s full potential.

I will say that, from personal experience, if the highest quality post is required,
you are okay to do the editing in the DVCPro HD format natively, but when you start
to push it in color correcting or keying or ANY kind of manipulation, it falls
apart pretty quickly. It recompresses badly. So avoid re-encode generations at all
costs. This may or may not become an issue in your case, just pointing it out.

These are not really easy questions to answer as you see. It really depends on how
you expect to use the footage, who it’s for and what the budget is. Ideally, you
don’t want to back yourself into a corner or go down a road so far throwing money
at something that might not do what you need it to only to find out later (too late)
that you should have done something else. It’s interesting and hard all at once
right now to build these kinds of solutions on a budget! This new camera is forcing
us all to re-evaluate how we serve this kind of budget HD with the current crop of
tools. I am fortunate to have a Quantel eQ at my disposal which is brilliant at
handling all of the varispeed stuff, but I also didn’t have to pay for it myself!!! 😉
Our ‘everyday’ clients are starting to use this new camera and are balking (rightfully so)
at the rates we need to charge to make money with these systems and some have built
their own more cost-appropriate-for-their-situation sytems (given the ‘cheap’ camera
and tape costs). For some that has been fine. For others who expect the kind of
workflow and flexiblity available in high-end HD or even low-end SD systems, it’s
a painful lesson. If you are shooting a lot of footage that’s variable, know that
any software solution currently available (read: FCP) requires all of the captured
footage to be rendered to read the flags after capture via firewire (flags aren’t
transferred via BM or AJA cards). That takes time. Also, those files then do not
have any reference to source TC or reel name or any other metadata associated with
the original file. That’s fine if you are staying within that system for the finish,
but if not, it kind of puts a kink in the whole operation. Not to piss on the
Panasonic/FCP parade, but it is a serious issue in the world I’m currently working
in, especially the first time some unsuspecting producer learns of this fact after
planning to finish in a eQ or *smoke!

Sorry to ramble, hope this helps!
Good luck!

-Troy Murison
Flying Spot
Seattle

[Jeffrey Di lullo]

Troy,

In relation to the Variable Frame rate footage and FCP, what is the plug-in that you are speaking about? You also mentioned that all the variable frame rate footage must be captured via firewire. Are you saying that Variable frame rate footage from the HVX cannot be properly delt with via the “import P2” command in FCP? Do you have a specific work flow in mind for working with FCP and Variable frame rates (ie. easy setup/ sequence setup/ HVX200 setup)?

Thank you for your help.

Jeffrey Di Lullo
bbc&s video communications

[David Newman]

If you going to use Xeons, get the Demspey based Xeons with the 1066Mhz FSB, the 800Mhz parts you have selected have quite a significant memory bottleneck — not great for HD. Keep out blog on the performance of the Dempsey/Glidewell Xeons (https://cineform.blogspot.com/2006/06/four-cores-more-merrier.html.)

Also you should also consider a Prospect HD + AJA Xena LH/e combination. This will get you 10-bit compressed processing, without the multigeneration issues of editing in DVCPRO-HD. Info here https://www.cineform.com/technology/HDQualityAnalysis10bit/HDQualityAnalysis10bit.htm and here https://www.cineform.com/products/ProspectHD.htm.

– David Newman
– CTO, CineForm
– web: http://www.cineform.com
– blog: cineform.blogspot.com