RS422 control of Sony HDV VTR.

[Gary Adcock]

[Brian Conner] “Everything works great except deck control. The Sony HDV deck (and the Sony HDV camcorder as well) are not controllable. The client can Play, Stop, FF, REV, and set Ins and Outs, but when he captures, the deck cannot find the In point, and after poodling around the In point for a short while, flies off in reverse searching for it. “No communication” pops up below the image in the Log & Capture window.”

Busy ? me?
3 weeks in NYC for clients, NAB Post Plus NYC, VariCamp Orlando, Thanksgiving, GV Expo in DC….. yesterday was 218 days on the road this year.

Brian
I had sent a reply directly to you that in the settings that you sent me , the deck control was set to FW HDV and not NTSC DV. I do not know how the camera is set up and this is not some thing that can be diagnosed without all of the parts.
But this still sounds more as if it is a camera recording issue,
Has the Date and Time been set correctly on the camera?
Ignore TC breaks turned on in FCP?

The real solution is to dub the HDV tapes direct to HDCAM and edit from those as masters – that will solve all of these problems and is the recommended way to deal with the intra-frame compression issues of HDV tape.

Now if it can pass the network standards…

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA

[David Battistella]

Brian,

Thanks for the synopsis, I read through the thread a bit to quickly. I was able to get the firewire deck control to work when recaptruing the HDV through the sony deck. The andromedia was not around when I did my tests.

Gary is spot on with the transfer issue, but it will be interesting to see which networks will accept this as HD, because HDV isn’t really HD, it’s sort of H-DV a high quality prosumer product.

The way around the M-peg2 stream in post is to get it our of HDV, which means a transfer to a format with solid, reliable TC. I think that all of these limitations are very deliberate by Sony to keep this format in the Prosumer realm, hence the lack of RS-422, etc. This is sort of what they did with the early DV decks and camera’s, na machien control kept their Betacamers happy, and now they want to keep their HDcammers and XDcammers happy until they can release an HD version of the XDCAM.

David

[Brian Conner]

Gary,

Thank you for that reply. I apologize to you for being extremely unclear in explaining publicly about not getting a reply from you. From your reply here and in your private Email, it’s obvious that your previous Email got lost in the Ether, or blocked by an overzealous Email server. I sincerely apologize for giving the wrong impression here on the Cow. It was unintentional, but obviously I failed to communicate clearly.

The Easy Setup folder I sent you has two presets, and you’re referring to the other one. The one I was hoping to get working properly is the one with the Easy Setup name starting with Z. The Device Control on that preset is for using the Control L port from the HDV deck, through the Addenda RS-4/L adapter to the K-Box RS-422 port.

That’s the one that behaves as I described in my reply to David above here.

But, I will try the suggestion you Emailed me. The one difference between that suggestion, and what I had originally tried when I was building this system is the iLink Downconvert setting on the HDV deck. I’ve Emailed the client and told him to try this. He’s in the middle of editing his show, so it might be a few days before he even reads my Email.

Than you, Gary and David.

[Brian Conner]

Well, my client decided to try this immediately.

It works and he’s thrilled. So am I.

Repeating myself from a previous reply: The one difference between this Device Control Setup and what I first tried as I was building this system is the VCR menu setting for iLink Downconvert. That must be the trick.

Thank you all, and particularly thank you, Gary.

I have told the client to hold onto the Addenda RS-4/L adapter, because we might find a way to get that to work yet.

Brian Conner

[Gary Adcock]

[Brian Conner] “It works and he’s thrilled. So am I.”

Sometimes the problem is in the details. sometimes it is the detail.

Glad it is working.

gary

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA

[Brian Conner]

I was just now re-reading this entire thread. I’m thinking I might have misunderstood your post of Oct 11 at 9:00:50pm. If, when you wrote. “manually set the deck control to DV,” you were referring to the iLink Downconvert menu setting that I should have done in the VCR, I misunderstood.

If that’s the case, I could’ve short-circuited the entire nightmare right at the start, and wouldn’t have spent the $148 plus shipping for the Addenda RS-4L.