Adam Smith
Forum Replies Created
-
I found that the Turbo.264 only works with the supplied built-in presets… which may be just fine for your project considering you probably don’t need any specific settings to play off the laptop.
It’s a cool device, it just wound up mostly useless for our project which had tens of hours of media to compress, but also detailed specs we had to meet. At least the thing was only a hundred bucks or so – not a huge loss.
– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor -
I’m guessing 100.1% duration as opposed to playback speed.
FCP always gets me with that when I’m trying to tweak speed on video clips – the percentage is the opposite of what I naturally think to do.
– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor -
I offload directly to Firewire HD all the time, but I use AC powered drives and have never tried a buss-powered FW drive. Are you trying to offload via Firewire or USB? As far as I know, the camera only supports Firewire Host mode and I do not believe you can dump directly via USB.
FYI – When I dump to FW (AC powered) I connect the drive, switch the camera into FW Host mode, wait 15 seconds or so and then power on the drive. You can also have the drive powered on and connect it ‘hot’ but I’ve read it’s a bad idea to connect drives like that so I avoid it.
The first time the drive is connected you will need to format it with the camera. Of course this will wipe all existing data. From then on, each card offloaded will create a new partition with size matching the card capacity. Note that there seems to be a limit to the number of partitions on a FAT32 drive (12?).
I dump most of my footage direct in this manner, and have yet to have any issue. However I’m generally not doing this in the field – I dump at my desk, connect to the edit system, spot check to verify the contents all seem to be there, then duplicate media with verify to 2 more drives before I truly feel safe wiping the cards.
– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor -
[Martin Bolduc] “since it uses only a small part of the CCD chips”
Ok, here’s my take on the deal…
If you’re shooting at Widescreen 16×9 then you are recording the whole image… all imaging is performed at 1080p and then downconverted to whatever format you are recording. Flip between 480/720/1080 and you will see all the same content on-screen (if you have SD set to 16×9).
Now if you prefer to shoot SD Letterbox then you truly do only wind up saving a portion of the image that your camera captured. But I’m not sure how much that affects quality…
Widescreen 16×9 is the original HD 16×9 image scaled down to 480 vertical resolution, then squeezed horizontally to fit everything into your 4×3 recording.
Side Crop takes the original 16×9 signal, scales it to 480 vertical like above, but it just ignores the sides of the image instead of scaling to fit. You lose some width on your shot.
Letterbox first Side Crops your shot, then places black bars over the picture, giving you a 16×9 shape – but this is not the full 16×9 image scaled to fit in 4×3 with matte, it’s the camera cropping and covering your original image, only leaving a small window revealing a 16×9 shaped area.
So yes in some manner, shooting Side Crop or Letterbox is discarding some of the information from your imaging. But does that affect quality?
Both Widescreen and Side Crop have the full content vertically but Widescreen is squeezed horizontally, while Side Crop is squeezed vertically. There may be some minor difference in quality accounting for PAR but it sounds like a wash to me if you don’t care about losing the sides.
Letterbox is the same image as Side Crop but with top and bottom obscured – so the image you wind up with has the same exact pixels and quality as Side Crop.
The only way I can think what your friend is saying makes sense, is if you preferred to shoot Letterbox… you could frame the shot in Letterbox with its reduced field of view, and then switch to Widescreen or HD (you now have a much wider shot) and zoom in to reframe the shot like you had before. This would capture that same scene using the full area of the image sensor and at higher resolution! The question is… if you need to deliver Letterboxed content, you’re going to have to scale everything down to letterbox anyways… will you see any difference then?
– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor -
Last time I shot in the snow we didn’t have LCDs so not sure there… =) and I dunno if I’d worry much about the lens mechanics. I don’t think a hand-warmer would get hot enough to cause issues with condensation inside the lens but I don’t think I’d bother with it anyways (unless the camera guy’s hands are freezing).
Batteries can certainly be an issue. Useable capacity can drop greatly in the cold and I’d consider some means of protecting the batteries from extreme temperatures.
– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor -
[Helmut Kobler] “I *do* notice that my Snow Leopard Mac will fail to wake from sleep since moving to Snow Leopard, and I suspect it has to do with Panasonic’s driver.”
I did a clean install of Snow Leopard on a fresh drive, and have not yet installed anything FCP or P2 related and I’m still getting locks on waking from sleep. The screens come up, but no mouse or keyboard and the clock is not flashing.
(Actually I guess I did install AJA LHe drivers – but haven’t been in Snow for long enough to say whether that could be the cause of the no-wakey problem)
– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor -
Of course out of the camera straight into a DVD recorder is the best option, but if you’re stuck working from files I’ve yet to come up with a truly quick and easy way to do this.
Adding the TC filter in FCP seems to be the best way to go but takes time and eats up 2-3 times the disk space.
If you have the means to use your MXF content directly in Compressor (I use Raylight but I think there are better options these days) then you can encode to MPEG2 and add a timecode filter (which is not as easy to see as the one in FCP) in the same pass. Problem here is, adding lots of clips into a track in DVD Studio Pro is a royal pain. Very frequently the audio clip is a frame or two shorter than the video, which multiplied by tens of clips, leads you to have very out-of-sync audio unless you check and adjust each clip.
Perhaps I should try using some tool to MUX the files before DVDSP… but then that’s adding back in a step although it would be a lot faster and more disk-space efficient than duping the original media in FCP.-Adam
– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor -
When you install P2CMS you also get a quicktime component that allows you to open audio and video MXF files in quicktime… which also means you can drag those MXF files into FCP. I’d look at the file name for the clips you can see in P2CMS (but not FCP) and try dragging them right into a bin. You’ll have to manually drag and re-sync any audio tracks, but it may get you going.
– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor -
[Robert Ober] “Is this a safety thing so folks don’t overwrite stuff they may want? Is it a limitation of the P2 tech?”
It’s certainly a safety thing… you cannot just record over clips, on purpose or accidentally.
If you switch the camera into playback mode, you can select and delete single or multiple clips (be reeeeeeal careful you’ve got the right stuff selected), or you can format a card to erase it fully.
-Adam
– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor -
Wow that’s interesting if the 300 manages the disk differently than the HVX-200 and HPX-500.. both of those use FAT32.
Can’t say I’d complain if the transfers were faster, but not being able to mount the disks would sorta negate that benefit, heh.
– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor