[1000dollarfilm]

Thanks Uli,

The German workaround is profoundly smart. In particular the XML export and edit to get a p50 timeline.

The Raylight solution seems to offer an interesting alternative… the demo is pretty impressive.

We’d spotted that “Color” for CC was out, but I prefer Magic Bullet Colorista/Look for grading, anyway. But, thanks for the heads up, because if we had been relying on “Color” for our CC, it’s exactly the kind of snag I was asking people to flag up.

Just one addendum… we went ahead and tested the FCP6 “log and transfer” and you can import 720p50… but, it’s just a pity there still isn’t a 720p50 timeline setting!

[1000dollarfilm]

Thanks Marcus, I’ve downloaded the demo… from what I’ve read so far it seems to be the easiest way of working with this footage.

[1000dollarfilm]

Big thanks to all of you, we’re going to look into everything.

We also apreciate everyone who took the time to challenge our basic premise… we do absolutely believe that micro-budget shouldn’t mean a compromise in quality. In terms of our own project, we will shoot on the best format we can acquire.

However, we’re also passionate about helping people make good movies even when they’ve got incredibly limited resources. An even deeper belief is that the quality of the story you tell, can overcome for the audience a less than perfect image (from a technical POV)… but, with that said we still think that it’s important to be able to push the technical performance of whatever kit you’ve to the edge of its limitations.

[1000dollarfilm]

Thanks Herb, I think we’ll throw up a DVCProHD timeline and have a play.

Thanks to everyone else as well. We know you’re right, it would be easier to shoot on Varicam… but, there’s more to this project than simply finding the simplest route from point A to point B.

If anyone else has got any bright ideas about how we can get the most out of DV in post, regardless of how off beat, we’d be massively interested.

[1000dollarfilm]

Sincere and big thanks to both of you!

Interesting — if we drop them onto a HDV timeline, will we need to resize/reshape the pixels?

Oh, and I apologise… I forgot to mention that we’re shooting in PAL.

As to the reason we’re even bothering, well, that’s a slightly different story.

We’re sort of obsessed with micro budget film making and although we can get access to any number of HDV and full HD cameras, were also interested in figuring out ways to make stuff of cinema quality regardless of what kit you’ve got to shoot on.

So, because we know that there is still more DV out there than HD, and DV camera prices are falling through the floor, we wanted to see whether creativity and lateral thinking could make up for anyone’s short fall in budget.

[1000dollarfilm]

Aha! Yes, that got it.

Thanks Russ, I’d only deleted the general preferences in the main library, not the FCP data in the user library.

God only know what I did to cause the problem in the first place!

I can’t thank you enough for your time and patience.

Cheers

[1000dollarfilm]

Hi,

I was involved in the very early days for Vari-Cam and shot my first feature film on it. We were only using it for it’s ability to shoot 24fps and didn’t use it for slo-mo.

We ran into horrendous problems with frame rate convertion, when we down shifted from HD to DigiBeta. This was because the very early Varicams had a glitch in the software which flagged the frames and this resulted in the timecode becoming separated from the frames during the conversion.

Basically, when we came to online we had to adjust every single clip by hand, as they were anything between four frames and two seconds out of sync.

The good news is that this glitch was sorted very early on and frame rate conversion is a fairly painless problem these days.

I’m a big fan of the Varicam, it’s a good system, but I think the thing I learned on that outing is that it pays not to be one of the first people to use a new system. Almost all of the workflow problems I’ve encountered over the years of pioneering HD and HDV have occurred when people have been using the very latest equipment.

Varicam has been around long enough now for the workflows to be well understood and stable.

[1000dollarfilm]

Thanks for that, but that hasn’t fixed it.

I’ve deleted the preferences from the Preference File in Library of the main hardrive and re-started.

The problem is still there.