[Adam Levine]

I have an IF AE8 and was planning to use it, though I was hoping there was a custom cabling option to go direct.

With the IF AE8 I still need some sort of breakout cable, right? (DB-25 <-> 2XLR x 4 x 2)

[Adam Levine]

[Bob Zelin] “REPLY – the Sonnet E4P is a GREAT product, and the Sonnet Fusion 500 is not out yet (at least they didn’t send me one) – but the port multiplier feature will be fantastic. You can certainly go with 2 4 port cards and 8 drives, but make sure you get HI QUALITY SATA enclosures like Firmtek, or Kano Technologies – not junk. Some of the cheap SATA enclosures will give you bad connections to your SATA drives, and you will think that you made the wrong decision. I use Firmtek exclusively, and they are FANTASTIC. I am anxious for Sonnet to send me a Fusion 500 to try out. I hate Highpoint products.”

Why no love for Highpoint? I’ve been running a RR 1820a since it came out and I’ve never had problem. Any opinion on the Burly port multiplier cases Rick at MacGurus is selling? FYI, according to Sonnet, there’s a max 220 MB/sec across each eSATA cable, so 2 cables->2 multipliers->8 drives would max out at 440, which is pretty decent, I guess. Still not sure on this whole port multiplier deal, seems like something for nothing, which never works out in the end.

[Bob Zelin] “You can’t do an HD project just judging on a SD monitor, but if you have to, the PVM-20L2 is still availabled, and it’s very good”

That’s what I have. Great monitor.

[Bob Zelin] “REPLY – the resolution of the 23″ and 30” Cinema displays (and others from Dell, HP and Sony) will be dramatically better than the consumer monitors from Phillips, Pioneer, and the like, but I cannot deny that clients love the newer Plasma or LCD “super bright” or backlit monitors that you see in stereo stores. Most non technical clients will go “wow” with any 50″ TV, but yawn at a hi res 23″ Apple Cinema display. I just saw this happen at a Disney conference room, where they had a HORRIBLE Zenith 50″ Plasma (what a piece of crap) – and everyone said “wow”.”

I know, it’s really a toss up. In the client area of my studio right now, I have a 14″ Panasonic reference monitor and a really crappy 20″ LCD which I got at Costco for $250. EVERYONE prefers the LCD. Anyway, things like that make me want to get the Phillips plasma (backlit, of course!), which is a pretty decent picture for what it is. I can’t do color correction on the Apple monitor anyway, so I’m not sure what the point is beyond technolust. Does the HDMI convertor come with the Multibridge?

[Bob Zelin] “REPLY – Editing while wearing women’s underware brings out your feminine side. If you decide to do this, please post pictures on this forum, so we can all see.”

Like I would ever show you guys!

[Adam Levine]

I would agree with Steve to a point. I treat HDV the way I treat DV that will be onlined to DigiBeta. Capture/offline in DV. After you lock picture, then use the Media Manager to recompress as uncompressed. Then color correct/title/etc the new timeline. My experience is that this is the best workflow with prosumer formats and FCP

[Adam Levine]

So long as you have Qt and the BM codec installed you are good.

[Adam Levine]

It is not a codec created by BM, perhaps I was unclear. This is part of QT and has been for years. Any QT-based app can use it.

Some background: back around version 2 of FCP (2000?), someone discovered that a G4 Mac or better would be able to capture from any source and encode it as Quicktime P-JPEG on the fly (just using the CPU and built-in QT functions). Apple incorporated this into a later release of FCP as a half-rez offline setting they call “Offline RT”, which is just half-rez P-JPEG Quicktime at 35% spatial quality. On the release of the first DL card (I bought one about 2 months after they hit the market), BM incorporated this capability (albiet with a larger frame and higher quality) into their own FCP settings files.

So to sum up, this is about what FCP/QT do with the video signal on capture, and really has little to do with BM software or hardware. Really, “Online JPEG” is a group of settings for FCP and QT which are installed along with the rest of the BM software and settings files.

Any app you use that incorporates QT encoding will be able to do the same thing, with the proper settings. As an example, I have created numerous different offline JPEG settings (for different projects) for use in FCP, all of which with work with either an SDI or Firewire souce signal. Unfortunately, FCP does not support RT for anything but the Apple Uncompressed and DV codecs, so there are no RT FX

[Adam Levine]

This is a feature that uses built-in Quicktime functions. Anything can be captured on a Mac using the P-JPEG codec.

[Adam Levine]

It all depends on what kind of deck you use. If you use an SDI deck, then you can go through the DL card, which will remove pulldown. You will have to create and Offline JPEG setting for that so that you don’t kill your drives with tons of uncompressed offline footage (I have a preset with full frame JPEG at 35% quality that I use).

Otherwise, capture over FW and use Cinema Tools to remove pulldown (Use the “DV-NTSC 24P” Easy Setup) . If your facility can do it, have them lay the tape down with Advanced Pulldown so you can remove on capture (DV-NTSC Advanced Pulldown Removal” Easy Setup)

It’s good practice to start your caps on an A frame and end on a D frame. Your facility will no doubt produce NDF tapes for you, so this means all A frames’ TC (29.97 NDF) will end with a 0 or a 5 and all D frames’ TC will end in a 4 or a 9. If you newed to use Cinema Tools, this will make things go more smoothly.

Also, the footage being anamorphic or letterboxed is immaterial.

Finally, do FOR SURE cut at 24P, since that’s how you shot, and how you will most likely finish. Otherwise you will have to conform the project durning online

[Adam Levine]

My $0.02, maybe worth what it costs 😉 :

I agree entirely with Jaun. Especially at HD-Cam SR, your picture will look brilliant. The picture I’ve seen from 35mm x-fers for HDCam SR look phenomenal on a good monitor though S16 definitely shows a lot more grain, as is to be expected (though depending on the narrative this can work in your favor). Though also, less expensive options like HDCam and Varicam will also yield excellent results, imo, but limited by their color undersampling. Also run off DVCam offline cassettes at the same time with both 60i and 24P TC burn, as well as film code and sound reel windows (I would pull up all the footage from your DVCam offline cassettes before you start and cut at 23.976). You can cut on any DV system and then online to an SR deck. I’m a total cynic when it comes to heavily compressed HD formats, but the Sony SR decks and cameras give an ubelievale picture (despite noticable pixilation when projected on VERY large screens i.e., over 25 ft tall). You will need a dual-link SDI card or Multibridge Extreme, and some mighty fast and copious drives for your online and color sessions.

A downside of doing such a high-end HD master is that you will have to downconvert and have a variety of screening masters for diffent projectors in different theaters/screening rooms (not to mention, duplicate textless masters for foreign). The last S16 project that I finished on Sony SR 4:4:4 12-bit looked phenomenal when projected natively, and even pretty good on the DigiBeta anamorphic downconvert I saw it projected on at a local film fest (this will also germaine to your DVD, unless HD-DVD somehow hit the market soon).

I must say, the interplay of the unevenely spaced and sized grain from film on a 1080×1920 pixel grid looked prety freaking cool and different, though not so much that it calls attention to itself.

One final point/question: why not just shoot on CineAlta SR and remove the middle man (processing/telecine)? They have setups now where you can spit out offline cassettes while shooting which is killer for assistant editors and editors.

[Adam Levine]

Sorry, I meant to say I was going to get a Multibridge Extreme when there is a viable storage option

[Adam Levine]

What is the cable length? I’ve always had to run extensions for the breakout cable on my DL Pro. Going to get a new G5 + DL extreme as soon as there’s a good SATAII RAID PCIe card for the Mac, and I want to be sure the cable can go from the back of my computer to my rack.