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Varicam 720/25 in Avid
This is probably a question for Michael P really, but I thought I’d throw it out here.
Panasonic’s Varicam is a strange beast. In my part of the world (with the ugly step-cousin PAL) Varicam is popular and painful. Varicam shoots everything at 59.94/60Hz on the tape, tagging only the frames you want to use as ‘active’. Shooting 25fps on Varicam then creates a problem that it’s impossible to capture the footage from the deck via Firewire (or even HD-SDI I believe) as in a 50Hz project Avid can’t communicate with the 60Hz deck.
Instead we either have to use the hardware framerate converter from Panasonic (which basically has a harddrive and buffers, retimes and restreams the images from the tape) or work around it (The HD1400 deck from Panasonic has modes to deal with this, but it insists on HD playback at 1080i50 only, not the native 720, and offspeed is not supported).
Currently to capture offspeed into Avid we have to create a 24p project, capture into that (where it expects the 60Hz deck) and then export an image sequence to reimport into the 50Hz project.
Given all of that, is anyone at Avid looking at the options with the format for PAL regions?
Currently the only software I know of that can properly capture 25fps baserate footage via Firewire from a Varicam tape is Canopus Edius Broadcast. FCP can’t, and has much the same sorts of problems (although it’s a little easier to retime the clips with Cinema Tools once they are captured).
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1 Reply
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Hello there,
On the AJ1400 there is a menu option that (i think) is called ‘System Format’ Set this to either 25(SD) or 25(HD) depending on what you want out of the back of the deck. Put your Varicam tape in and it will pull 25 fps off of the tape and spit it out of the SDI or HDSDI outputs (obviously not VFR) – the 422 is also converted to 25Hz. I’m also pretty sure you can tell this deck to output either 720 or 1080 – again this is in the menu – look through the manual or download it from Panasonic somewhere.
We do all of the VFR by loading in FCP and converting to 25 and laying back to tape.
I hope this helps,
Paul
Freelance DS/Symphony
London
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