Barry Green
Forum Replies Created
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Depends on your editing program. If using FCP, you “print to video”; set the camera’s recording settings to match the timeline settings of FCP, then turn the thumbnails off, and use the VCR REC buttons to record the incoming firewire data stream.
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[Noah Kadner] “Where do you read this on DVXuser? There’s a lot of folks making suggestions over there. Making a disk image of a P2 card is definitely not one of the things I’d recommend.”
Making a Disk Image is the workflow recommended by Apple. Apple themselves have said that instead of doing a Finder copy, you should make a Disk Image.
With that said, the recommended workflow on DVXUser is not to use a Mac at all for P2 card offloads! Yes I’ll catch heat for this, but I’m gonna say it anyway: the Mac is not the way to go for offloading cards in the field. Use FCP all you want to edit, that’s fine, but the Mac is less than ideal for card offloads. All the problems you hear about with P2 offloads have one inevitable common bottom line: someone used a Mac to copy the cards. There’s something broken in that workflow; either in MacOS or in Panasonic’s driver, I don’t know where it is, but it exists only on the Mac side of things. Glitchy file transfers, P2 volumes failing to mount, non-importable clips… always, always problems rooted in using a Mac to transfer.
The strong recommendation (by me, at least, of DVXUser) is to not use a Mac to offload cards if you have any other possible choice. Get a cheap PC laptop. Use it to copy cards to a hard disk. Import the hard disk contents into FCP, you’ll have 100% reliable imports. The problem is definitely not with FCP, it’s at a lower level than that; it’s either MacOS, or MacOS’s integration with FAT32, or the Panasonic Mac drivers. Somewhere in that combination, but it’s not in FCP; I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of card data transferred to drives using PC laptops, imported into FCP from those drives, it works absolutely reliably.
This is *not* a “Mac Vs. PC” thread, so please don’t anybody turn it into that! This is a “there’s something wrong with the drivers on MacOS” bug report. It needs to be fixed. Until it is reported as definitively fixed, I wouldn’t use a Mac to do card imports. (and yes, I know we’ll get dozens of “works for me” posts following this up; sure it works for you UNTIL IT DOESN’T. Look at the posts, look at the reports, look at the “why is my file glitched” posts, look at the “why doesn’t my P2 volume mount” reports… there’s one common denominator, they’re all always using the Mac. I was a professional computer programmer for 13 years; my debugging skills are telling me there’s something broken there.
As I understand it, the reason Apple recommends a Disk Image is twofold: one, it preserves the sector-by-sector data structure of the original card (instead of file-copying from FAT32 over to HFS), for one thing. Secondly, I believe there’s some sort of cyclic redundancy error-checking performed during the disk image process, which may help detect “the glitch” when it happens, saving you from the surprise of finding glitched frames on import.
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The jumps in panning are due to the OIS. Turn it off.
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[Mag One] “SO as for transfering HD footage back to your P2 so your client can see on there HD tv.. IS THIS POSSiBLE?”
Yes, it’s possible, and depending on what your editing platform is it can be downright easy. EDIUS supports exporting directly back to the card in proper MXF camera-playable format. So does AXIO.
If using FCP or Avid you can export back to the card by doing a “print to video” process, and using the camera to capture the incoming firewire data stream.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Yes the DVX has the same issue. It comes (apparently) from having a true manual zoom at this price point.
One thing you can do is a pre-zoom (if possible). It seems the jerkiness may be a bit more apparent if your last zoom was in the opposite direction, so if you zoom in just a little bit before you need to start the real zoom, then the lens is “primed” for that new zoom and may (and I do emphasize “may”) start a little cleaner.
The DVX and HVX zooms only operate at three speeds; slow, mid, and fast. On the DVX100B and HVX, that “slow” speed is about 30 seconds from full wide to full tele. You can’t feather in slower than that because the zoom speed is either on or off. You can try adding a little drag to the zoom ring (some finger pressure) to see if that lets you feather in a bit slower too.
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Side by side, DV to DV, the HVX looks better. In 4:3 it can be pretty darn close, but in 16:9 the HVX looks noticeably better.
HVX gets about 1 stop more dynamic range than the DVX as well.
In DV50 there’s no contest, the HVX is noticeably superior.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
CinePorter’s not out yet, and CitiDisk … well … it’s out, and there are user reports on it, so you can make up your own mind as to whether you want to try it or not.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Use cine-matrix and set your chroma level to +7. Also consider lowering the master pedestal down to around -8. That should make for some eye-poppingly-vivid color with nice deep blacks.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
If you want to view MXF files on the PC, you can download the free P2 Viewer software from Panasonic’s website.
If you have Apple Quicktime files on that hard disk, and they were rendered in the DVCPRO-HD codec, then you will need either Canopus EDIUS Broadcast or Avid XPress Pro to view those files. Quicktime player by itself will not show them; Apple has so far not updated the Windows version of Quicktime to be able to play those files.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
But Apple is the only one who can do anything about it. Nobody else can.
So if Apple won’t (even though it would cost them practically nothing to do so since the codec is freely available and they just have to hook into it) then I have no choice but to look at it as petty on their part. They have chosen to make Quicktime on the PC incompatible (to some degree) with Quicktime on the Mac.
Any way you slice it, the finger points at Apple. If they’re not doing it because they don’t know how, then I would use the index finger. If they’re not doing it solely for the purpose of making their product cross-platform incompatible, I might use a different finger.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db)