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working with HD without an HD card
Hello,
This seems like a really stupid setup, but here it is:I am working on this project that is delivering in HD. I made the cut with SD footage, which was all that was given to us at the time. We are being supplied with the HD footage next week. Here is the problem, I messed up at the beginning by not conforming the digibeta footage to 24p, because we are working in 3D in 24p. I didn’t do it, because originally I thought that we were getting the HD footage a long time ago, and that the SD was just for building a rough cut, and since the HD is going to be 24 and the digis were 29.97, I didn’t think that I was going to be able to just uprez the timeline. These are trailers that I am working with and the trailer has changed since we originally got them on digibeta, so it wouldn’t have mattered anyhow. So next week I am going to have to rebuild the edit…this will be a pain in it’s own right, but that isn’t even the real problem.
Here is the problem: Our flame has HD capture, our FCP system does not. We have an SD Kona card in the FCP. This is a big project, and you would think that we could just buy an HD capture card for the FCP system, but that is not going to happen for some reason. So I was wondering, can we capture the HD footage to the flame, and then transfer the files to FCP and I can rebuild the edit without having an HD capture card. We have SCSII raids, so storage space/speed won’t be a problem, but can you actually work with uncompressed HD without an HD card? We do not want to have the flame guy rebuild the edit because of the $$, and I don’t know flame at all. We have smoke on the same machine, but I am sure that I won’t be able to learn it between then and now! Is there anyway to do this without getting an HD card for the FCP system? It is so stupid, because the company just bought a MPEG converter card, which we do not even need, for probably close to the price of a KONA 2 or Decklink HD card…dumb.
Any help would be appreciated,
Eli MavrosEli Mavros
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1 Reply
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Your Flame is RGB, so if you capture HD to it and bring it over to FCP, you’ll lose a generation of color space. You’ll undoubtedly have to transcode it from Flame’s codec to an FCP-compliant codec (most likely Apple’s codec since you don’t have HD hardware). Stick with 10-bit so as to lessen the transcoding loss from Flame RGB to FCP Y’CbCr. I’m not certain which machine will be doing the transcoding though. Hmmmm.
You can edit in HD without hardware, but you’ll be working off the canvas window, which is a fraction of the HD size and far from the color accuracy as outputting to an HD CRT with hardware.
Dude, just convince them to return that MPEG-2 card and get a Kona2. It’s not that much money, especially compared to the alternative *loss* you’ll get in the long run by NOT buying it. Seems like poor business sense on their part, but just an opinion.
Sorry man, sounds like you’re in a big mess. =(
Marco Solorio | OneRiver Media
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