Trying to preview HDV timeline footage via firewire to Z1 camera / monitor

[Redgum]

The simple answer is that viewable signals cannot fit up the firewire (in realtime) from the timeline. Once the signal is commited to the camera you can view your video. The only answer to monitoring HDV in the short term is from a suitable graphics/capture card or external converter with analog YUV output. You could also watch SD composite but not for long. nVidia, and more recently Matrox have released graphic cards suitable for the HDV purpose but you need a PCIx bus. Dont forget you also need a HD monitor of some description otherwise viewing your output will be no better than your computer monitor or your camera LCD (which is also SD)

Redgum Television Productions
Broadcast & Corporate Documentaries
Brisbane, Australia

[Steve Freebairn]

As mentioned, the easiest way right now is to either use the second “head” of your display card to drive an HDTV, or if you have multiple monitors to get another display card to run the hdtv. The reason why you can’t monitor your video on an external monitor is because the Z1U and all of the HDV cameras right now only accept DV or HDV signals. Premiere uses Cineform’s codec to make editing a better experience and to also cut down on Native HDV compression problems. If the camera could understand Cineform’s codec then it could display out to a tv, but that almost guaranteed won’t ever happen. To display out through a camera you either have to edit hdv natively or wait until they have a computer fast enough to do realtime conversion to hdv during playback.

[David Farland]

Thanks both of you for the information. Its a shame because there is so much fiddling round when you output on a hdtv from your video card with not much pixel mapping. In certain configurations i.e dual lcd’s, I can get ppro to utilise the whole 2nd lcd monitor but it doesn’t want to do that when I use the 7800’s hdtv output. I’m hearing blackmagic will release their multibridge extreme ‘real soon’?? so hopefully that will let me real time preview on the sony 20″.
I found a post on the adobe site last night that said ppro won’t output a real time m2t monitor stream to the Z1 camera..it’ll only do it on export to tape which is what you guys are saying.
I’d suggest that a biggie for the next release.
thanks again,
Dave