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Varicam Project Work Flow? Downconvert or more drive space
Hi,
I am working on an indie HD documentary that we hope will be in theaters. The project will have 80-100 hours of material shot on the Varicam at 24p. Some of the footage was shot at variable frame rates. We plan to edit using FCP on a G5 dual 2 GHZ POWERPC. Right now I have 3.4 Gigs of Ram but plan to add another two. I also have a 1200a deck with firewire, but no SDI card. I also have a Huge Systems 500g drive from my last project. We would like to digitize all of our footage. That means 80-100 hours. We are trying to decide the bets way to do this as well as spend our money wisely. Here are the options that have been given to me.
1) Downconvert- buy the SDI card for the deck ($6,000) and a Kona 3 card. Down convert footage to DV as it inputs into FCP which would allow for less drive space and less crashing. Online with the final sequence. I am nervous about time code issues and how to deal with off-speed footage.
2) Firwire all footage and buy more drive space- I like this option, but have calculated that it will take 7-8 terabytes to digitize this much information. More money than we have in our budget and I am nervous of overkill on drives. I have also been discovering that the firewire capture device is tricky with 24p and cadence issues. However, this option sounds great for workflow. We wouldn -
5 Replies
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Why would you downconvert. The 24 fps Varicam footage is about 5.5mbs compared to DV at 3.8 mbs. I would just edit the whole film in the native DVCPRO HD resolution, invest in an HD card and an HD monitor. The drives you own can handle the Varicam Data rates. This is the huge advantage to working with Panasonic HD.
David
Peace and Love 🙂
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Hi David,
Thanks for the advice. The reason we were thinkign of downconverting is to have our entire project digitized–over 80 hours. But I agree with you it is best to work in DVC-PRO HD. If I do this I have to purchase some more drives. Since this is an indie doc we are low on money. Do you ha ve any recoemdations. I was goign to purchase additional G-Raid firewire 800 drives. Also do you think firewire in will be ok or would you recomend I get a Kona card and go SDI in.Any advice would be appreciated,
Sean
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Sean,
I think you’ll find that even purchasing the extra drives (perhaps two terabite fw drives at a cost of $2000 total) will be cheaper than the labor, machine rental and tapestock required to make downconverts which still have to digitized at real time into your NLE.
JS
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Fine,
Goo Firewire. Going in SDI froma prerecorded DVCPRO HD source is a waste of space. The quality does not get any better by going HD-SDI it just means that is will nt degrade through multigenerational rendering.
You can make a beautiful HD DVD stayin in the codec or you could eventually bring it to a house with FCP and a KONA and they could OP right to HDCAM SR. Just amke your movie and then worry about the final OP’s when you get the film finished.
Cut it all DVCPROHD native and go with GRAID’s
David
Peace and Love 🙂
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As an aside, you should know that with a capture card like the Kona 2 you can come in HD-SDI and still put the DVPRO100 codec on the storage. The card has hardware capabilities to do so, and my experience is that it’s more reliable than the FW method; it just seems like there are less hiccups.
If you intend to have an HD monitor for viewing you’ll need the card anyway (or some similar solution) and in the great scheme of things, the $2000 or less for the card isn’t very much money.
JS
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