What would I need to online an HDCAM film…

[Chris Borjis]

I’m glad you mentioned you had PCI-E, I had mentioned above
that dual G5 machines can and do have pci-e though apple didn’t
make them long before switching to intel.

[Bryan Roberts] “In theory, how much worse would DVCPRO HD 1080 look VS. uncompressed 1080 HD if it were ever projected in a medium sized theater? It’s the same resolution, the same amount of pixels so I guess it’s all about color reproduction?”

not quite.

DVCPRO-HD is a great, beautiful and robust work flow to be sure.

but it’s actually 1280×1080 where hdcam is 1440×1080 and hdcam-sr is 1920×1080. though they ALL playback at 1920×1080.

uncompressed is 1920×1080

there is a difference but I’m not so sure it could be really picked out if
everything is done properly.

It would certainly work and be a much much lower cost for sure
to do dvcpro-hd.

Recently I’ve done HDV to Blu-Ray for film festivals with an HDV 720P
source. It looked amazing projected in the theatre.

[John Pale]

Hard to say without actually seeing the film how much using DVCPRO HD will degrade it over uncompressed. Lighting conditions and shot composition have a lot to do with whether the compression will be noticeable. If you have the ability to do some tests with some of your most demanding shots, it might be helpful. Many people do very high quality work with DVCPRO HD every day, but it has its limitations. I’ve had some work that I have done using the DVCPRO HD codec projected in a large theater (The Orpheum in LA) and it looked very nice.