Varicam Compatability

[Gary Adcock]

[tony salgado] “Take dvcpro HD sequence and paste into into a standard def 525i 8 bit 23.98 uncompressed sequence. I am using the BM 8 bit 2vuy codec. FCP does the rescaling. I let the Kona and Kona 2 do the 3:2 pulldown for output to tape.”

It sounds as if Tony is using the older Kona HD board – the Kona 2 does both the downconvert and the pulldown addition on the fly without the need for a render and it does not use the BMD codecs, AJA is writing their own software now.
it is certainly faster when you do it in hardware and the K2 uses the same downconverter in hardware as the AJA mini converters.

this is a one step process on the Kona 2, and Kona LH.

From IBC

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL

[Matthew Romanis]

Thanks Guys for your posts.
I was trying to understand if the Kona 2 card was somehow different to the BM card in this slow down process, and it appears that it is not (though the down conversion seems to win).
On anything other than sports or event coverage the method of capturing 2-3 times the amount off tape than the “shoot time” is easily dealt with. But when dealing with a continuous shot that lasts for 20 -25 minutes you can see the difficulty of doing it this way in that you have to make between 6-8 (sometimes 12) multiple captures, each capture getting shorter in duration until you reach the point where you can stitch together the multiple clips into one continuous stream. For 20 mins of footage this process can take up to 2hrs just to capture.
We used to use the Panasonic FRC for these applications, but here in Australia access to them is limited now, they don’t like to travel and become notoriously unstable when bumped in transit.
An FCP FRC plugin developed for PAL would be a godsend, but for some reason no one has developed this, which is strange becuase in PAL (SD
) we only have one frame rate, surely it’s simple to do.
The difficulty with sports/event coverage is that we don’t have the ability to roll off the rest of the tape with bars or something at the time, we have to change tapes quickly and keep covering the event. Coming back to the tape and rematching TC in the camera, performing a return edit in camera and rolling out the tape is one way of dealing with this, but it only seems to work effectively half the time. FCP sometimes senses a dropped frame and will re-spool and re batch the material but with a 10-20 second gap in coverage.
Like I was saying earlier, most of what we shoot with the Varicam is cranked at 24/25 fps with the occasional shot intended for slow motion. It’s just these couple of Sports/Events shoots we do that create some hurdles.
I love the variable format capabilities of the Varicam, just two weeks ago I shot part of a doco for ESPN where I cranked the system frequency of the camera from 60 to 59.94hz and shot at 24fps for use back in the states in a 23.98 sequence. I then made a backup copy to HDD through the BM card and FCP in case anything happened to the tapes in transit. The next day I was shooting for PAL outcome again. What a system!!!
Gary, I love the idea of your Varicamps. We don’t have anything quite like that here which is why forums like these, and the Varicam forum, are such a tremendous resourse.
I thank you for your time.

[Tony]

Gary,

In this case no I am not using the older Kona HD card.

Matthew was referring to using FCP for the software downconversion. What I did was take a dvcprohd sequence created on a G5 xferred the files to a G4 where I dropped the dvcproHD sequence onto a standard def 8 bit BM 2vuy 23.98 for downconversion.

Rather than lay off to tape via the Kona 2 and then ingest back again into FCP at times it may be better to downconvert within FCP sequences if you have the time and value having a SD file rather than tape.

Tony Salgado

[Gary Adcock]

[matthew Romanis] “I was trying to understand if the Kona 2 card was somehow different to the BM card in this slow down process, and it appears that it is not (though the down conversion seems to win).”

That was part of my confusion matthew, this is a film concept and it has nothing to do with the card. It is just if you are trying to compress time you need to capture more of it allow it to pass by faster.

And yes IMHO doing the down convert in hardware is always better.

info on the Varicamps is available at https://www.hdexpo.net

From IBC

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL

[Gary Adcock]

[tony salgado] “n this case no I am not using the older Kona HD card.
What I did was take a dvcprohd sequence created on a G5 xferred the files to a G4 where I dropped the dvcproHD sequence onto a standard def 8 bit BM 2vuy 23.98 for downconversion.

Sorry for my assumption then, but the K2 can function very erratically when using the BMD codecs in on your K2 machine. This is not recommended. hence my response

I do not disagree about the need for an internal down conversion for some however, but I have a router so I am comfortable just doing a recapture.

From IBC

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL