Barry Green
Forum Replies Created
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Yes, because the original DVCPRO-HD codec wasn’t designed for 1080/24p. The 720p codec was designed from the beginning to support variable frame rates. The 1080 version is designed only as an interlaced codec.
When recording 24p in 1080, the camera has to employ the same 2:3:3:2 or 2:3 pulldown as used on a DVX or SDX. This involves flagging the start of an interlaced sequence (the “A” frame of a five-frame group). With 720p, each and every frame gets flagged “active” or not. In 1080/24p, there’s only one flag, at the beginning of each group.
It’s recorded that way and then piped out the firewire that way. Doing it this way makes the camera compatible with tape decks and capture applications that are expecting to see a full 100-megabit DVCPRO-HD signal.
Now, as to why P2 doesn’t know how to remove pulldown from the 1080 signal in the same way that it knows how to remove “inactive” frames from a 720 signal… that’s a good question. It’s probably because no editing system knows what to do with a 1080/p file, because up until the HVX there hasn’t been such a thing as a DVCPRO-HD 1080/progressive signal…
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
Look up any of those gray-market sellers on resellerratings.com to see how the scam works.
Short story: you will not get any product at all, without spending at least $3400. Through overpriced worthless “accessories”, inflated shipping charges, etc., basically every invoice that anyone’s posted about, show that the total bill comes to $3400.
Buy instead from an authorized reseller, you’ll get the same price, but you’ll also get a $300 rebate, the DVX Book/DVD, Magic Bullet for Editors software, a box of the new Advanced Master Quality tapes, and a free 5400mah battery. Not to mention you actually get a warranty too.
You won’t get any of that stuff if you go gray-market.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
The data that gets recorded (whether via firewire or onto a P2 card) is identical, in all of the 1080 modes or for 720/60p, or for DVCPRO-50 or DVCPRO-25 or DV. All the same flags, etc., are all included.
The only circumstance where anything is different at all is in 720p mode, when you’re recording at less than the full 60fps rate. For those circumstances, P2 will drop duplicate frames and only store the active frames, whereas the firewire streaming signal will include all 60 frames (appropriately flagged for removal).
The stream is kept consistent at 100mbps so it will work compatibly with other products (such as the AJ-HD1200A firewire-enabled DVCPRO-HD deck).
If the Firestore people want to take advantage of space efficiency, they could probably intercept the signal, detect duplicate-frame flags, and drop those frames, and only record the active frames for 720p mode. The flags are there in the stream, so there would likely not be much benefit to them trying to interface through a P2 slot.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
Okay, first, let’s keep things in perspective — the camera isn’t due out for another six or seven months. There’s a lot of time (a LOT of time) for companies to announce all sorts of products.
Second, FocusInfo, manufacturers of the FireStore, are a member of the P2 licensing family (a “P2 Partner”). The implication is obvious, even if the announcement hasn’t been made public yet.
Third, there are other ways, using products today, that you could record HD without even having to get a FireStore. If you have a long firewire cable, you could hook up to an Avid Express HD system, or a Final Cut Pro HD system, and capture directly. Plug a cheap USB2 drive in, and record for four or five hours continuously, at a cost that’s about 30% LESS than it would cost to record to tape. You’re going to need a computer and edit system, so I don’t think using it would qualify as an additional cost.
Being cabled like that may be inconvenient (certainly impractical for some shooting purposes!) but it’s a rare shoot indeed where I’m not tethered via firewire cable to my laptop running DV Rack. DV Rack is almost a necessity now, as far as I’m concerned. And, yes, Serious Magic has stated that they’re already talking with Panasonic, about making a DVCPRO-HD version of DV Rack available. Again, run that on your laptop or desktop, via a long firewire cable, and you could record hours of footage straight to an off-the-shelf hard disk.
Or, run that same cable to a tape deck, for those who want to record to tape.
There are options. There will be options. There are months and months to go before the camera comes out, which means there will likely be even more options. Not to mention that there will likely be alternative sources for P2 cards as well (presumably Lexar or SanDisk or Kingston or others will license and manufacture their own) which will bring the costs down as much, and as quickly, as competition makes possible.
Plus, we don’t know what type of product Focus may make. Maybe they’ll make a FireStore FS-4 type of product. Or, maybe they’ll make a controller that will allow direct recording to *any* USB2 or firewire type of drive.
There will likely be many options.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
Absolutely — glad to help.
And, oh yeah, I should have mentioned to open the LCD — the speaker is inside there, so with the LCD closed it “muffles” the sound a lot… 🙂
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
Probably more than 99% chance. Focus isn’t just in communication with Panasonic, they’ve signed up to be a P2 Partner, and they’ve already delivered one product so far (a file format conversion utility). They’re on the bandwagon…
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
It’s happened a couple of times since Jarred upgraded the software. Some sort of server or DNS problem. I believe you can still access it if you know the IP address, but I don’t…
I’ve notified Jarred, so the situation should be resolved shortly.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
Yes it’s possible, although not ideal. DV has fairly low chroma sampling, so greenscreen keying can be tough. Look at SeriousMagic.com’s Ultra keying product for some examples of how DV can be effectively keyed.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
The built-in speaker volume isn’t very loud. I don’t know that it’s dramatically lower than most other cameras, but it certainly isn’t loud.
As for the hiss — that hiss is not being recorded. The DVX has the cleanest audio circuitry of any prosumer camera. The hiss is a byproduct of Panasonic doubling the headphone output volume. They designed the original DVX100 camera to work with professional headphones (like Sony MDR-7506’s) and it works perfectly with them — but many, many people used cheap consumer headphones, which don’t have enough amplification, so the result was a lot of public whining about low headphone volume. So, on the DVX100A, Panasonic boosted the gain on the headphone circuitry by 6db, making the headphone output twice as loud, but introducing some hiss in the process. The hiss is only in the headphone circuit, not in the actual recorded audio.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
[Graeme Nattress] “Say you’re shooting 60p, out of the component outputs to tape, or converted to SDI and captured direct to disk or something – what happens to the 30p you can record on the camera?? Does it drop every other frame or what? Surely the shutter speed would appear doubled on the 30p footage making it look very different to the visual appearance of the 60p?? Or are they going to do some magic smoothing jigger-pokery like they are giving the option for in the 24p mode? “
You ask a good question. And until the camera ships, or Ken Freed weighs in, I don’t know that we have a definitive answer.
One thing I can say is that yes, it does have the “magic smoothing jigger-pokery” as applied for the 24p mode — meaning, they do have the ability to do 60p frame-blended down to 30p and recorded as 30p. What it looks like is still an unknown — at NAB they didn’t demonstrate the “Motion Smoothing” filter. Some have speculated that it’ll look like 30p shot with a 1/30 shutter.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a)