What would I gain with a Kona card added to my current workflow?

[Jerry Hofmann]

You’d need a Fibre Channel card… ATTO’s would be the place to go and an Array. Huge Systems or Medea are the hot tickets out there right now for drive arrays. Both have forums here at the COW too.

You can connect the component HD analog out from an LH series card from HDV and capture it directly as DVCPROHD material BTW. I’ve written an article for the next COW magazine about this VERY workflow… funny you should ask. The Kona 3 though does all those cross conversions, however you’d need a mini component analog to HD SDI converter to capture the analog HD from the HDV equipment. But it sure does blow the doors off editing HDV natively BIG TIME.

Jerry

[Stuart Cummings]

Hi Greg, As you may know by now the canon H1 camera does not embed the audio in the HDSDI signal which makes it more of a hassle to capture nor does it allow for deck control or timecode. We are currently producing the second season an National Hd cable show shot with several of these cameras however we chose a much different approach the the post workflow,The main piece of hardware we use is the Convergent Designs Connect LE this little gem of a box takes your HDV video/audio/timecode out thru the firewire connection and converts/disembeds the Video/audio and converts it to uncompressed HDSDI with the Audio embeded something that all the Hd Kona cards can read and use.You can use uncompressed hdsdi or convert to in our case, DVCPRO HD 1080i 60 in real time. It will also take the time code and convert it to RS-422 so that the Kona card can control the camera/deck. The deck control has a little slower response time than say a broacast deck but it DOES WORK well enough. I was involved in the beta testing of the Connect LE driver develoment for the H1 so i can attest to the support and commitment that Mike Schell and his team have for the product. I should mention that we use a sony HDV deck via firewire instead of the camera because the cameras are always in the field. We tested the Miranda box which does the same thing however it costs 600-700 more and does not support firmware updates from a MacFirmware updates with this productare done with a PC only. The Connect Le team has been quik with new firmware updates and the performance has gotten even better with these fienware updates not to mention the fast response to any intial tech support we needed since we started using the Connect Le in early march.They are both good products but being a mac only house we chose the Connect LE. Greg/Walter please feel free to contact me at 561-213-5209 or email me at Stuart@watermarkhd.com if you have any further questions.You can call Mike Schell at Convergent Designs and tell him Stuart Cummings sent you and he may be able to set you up with an eval. unit so you can see what a truly breakthrough awrd winnig product this is. PS I DO NOT WORK FOR this company. I just wanted to set everybody straight as to the best way handle to hdv video in a Pro broadcast facility. Good Luck Stuart Cummings Watermark Productions

[Kevin Wild]

I also use the Kona LHe card to ingest DVCProHD from the Canon H1 into Final Cut Pro. I would love to stop using the camera as a deck, but guess what? There is NO DECK on the market that currently supports Canon’s 24F mode. So, for now, I take in via the HD SDI to LHe. I do not have the benefit of getting timecode in using this method, so that’s a bummer if projects ever come back for re-edits. I’m also looking to get the HD DV Connect, so thanks for the review. I have yet to hear if it supports 24F…

One thing that nobody has mentioned is the workflow to output to tape. I have found interlacing issues due to the fact that HD is upperfield and SD is lower field. What I do to switch fields and make the 24F footage look great, is to do a pass in After Effects of the final file. I interpret footage as lower field, resize it for SD (either letterboxed or cropped full-screen) and then render it. It takes FOREVER to do this render, so I usually leave them overnight.

Walter or anyone else, does the Kona real-time output do this field-switch automatically? I’m almost always doing outputs to DVD, so it doesn’t help me much, but is good to know for archiving.

Thanks. Kevin

[Stuart Cummings]

Hi Kevin , Try contacting Mike Schell at Convergent Designs they might be able to support the 24F mode of the H1 now or at some future date. They wrote the drivers and refineds the original Canon H1 drivers in about a week. Good Luck Stuart

[Greg Mulvey]

What should I get if I need the following?

Shooting and editing multicam with two Canon H1s in free run time code. I need this time code to transfer so I can sync up the cameras in Final Cut. Also, since the audio is not embeded via the Canon’s HD-SDI I would need analog audio inputs I believe.

I also need to be able to upconvert SD footage that I will be mixing in with the HDV footage.

My current system is a Dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC G5 with 4.5GB of Ram and is PCI.

Greg Mulvey
Designer:Animator
https://www.gregmulvey.com

[Jerry Hofmann]

DVCPROHD files are about 4 times the size of HDV files… they vary a bit, but they are definately larger.

With the cost though of disk drives crashing every day, it’s still a great trade off to the long conforming times HDV presents. 750 gig drives are shipping now… can you imagine? I find that incredible. Weibetech just lowered all of their prices too…

Jerry