Barry Green
Forum Replies Created
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[doka15] “One last question regarding native mode. If you shoot 12 FPS native it lays 12fps to the P2 cards. But, if you shoot 12 FPS to hard drive (normal mode) will it then do a 12 to 30 conversion like 24 to 30 with duplicated frames?”
Sort of, but not to 30 — it converts to 60. When shooting 720p, there are three timebases you can choose. You can shoot 720/24pN, 720/30pN, or 720/60p. When using the “N” modes it only records the active frames to the card — so, 12fps gets written to the tape at 12 frames per second. How it gets played back is the determining factor of whether you choose 24pN or 30pN — if you chose 24pN, that 12fps will get played back at a 24fps rate, resulting in 2:1 fast motion. If you chose 30pN, that 12fps will get played back at a 30fps rate, resulting in 2.5:1 fast motion.
However, when you choose “over 60” mode, that’s totally different. The two modes you can choose are “Native” or “Over 60”. “Native” stores active frames only. “Over 60” stores 60 frames no matter what frame rate you chose. So it will duplicate frames to pad out the sequence to 60. So in the case of 12fps, each frame will be written to the card (or firewire) five times. The result is a very different look — it almost looks like slow motion, instead of fast motion! The “Over 60” mode is compatible with the way the VariCam shoots and the way the AJ-HD1200A DVCPRO-HD tape deck records. If you want to stream from the camera straight to the 1200A tape deck, you’d use the “Over 60” method.
Choosing “Over 60” doesn’t lock you into that step-printing look; you can still extract the frames in post (using something like the Apple Frame Rate Converter utility) which will create a new file with only the active frames in it. So you can accomplish the exact same thing, just with an extra step.
But the ability to record in 24PN, 30PN, or “Over 60” means that for each variable frame rate, there are actually three different looks you can accomplish!
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Yep, powerbook+FCP would handle that just fine. We used both the internal and external drives. Obviously you would want the fastest internal drive you could get, preferably 7200rpm. But even an old 1.33ghz powerbook could play back full-screen, full-res, full-frame rate DVCPRO-HD off its internal hard disk.
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What you’re thinking of is “Native” mode. And yes, the European version should most certainly have Native mode.
Advanced on the DVX was a different type of 24-to-30 conversion, which is something that the PAL version never needed to do. But “Native” on the HVX is a space-saving method on the P2 card, and both European and American versions should support it.
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[toke lahti] “We should also remember that televisions are getting more and more like computers that can replay any framerates. At the same time internet is beginning to be a global distribution channel. So “regional” framerates are slowly fading away.”
I wish that were true, but it’s not necessarily so. When I had an HD100 I put it in 25p mode and plugged it into my CRT HDTV — no signal at all. TV wouldn’t even recognize it. And broadcasters in the US have no standard for anything other than regional framerates — the ATSC ensconced 23.976hz, 29.97hz, and 59.94hz, and that’s it. There is no broadcast infrastructure in the US to handle 25hz or 50hz. So programming in the US will continue to originate in those three frame rates, and European broadcasters are going to broadcast 25hz and 50hz to maintain compatibility with the last 50 years’ worth of programming sitting in their libraries.
“regional” framerates aren’t going anywhere, they’ll be with us until UHDTV gets adopted sometime in, oh, 2050 or so.
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[doka15] “So is the Pal version going to offer advanced 25p or other Advanced p’s using the P2 cards?”
There’s no such thing as “advanced” pulldown when talking about the PAL models, because there is no pulldown. In 25P in 1080 or 480, it’s two fields per frame. In 720 mode, it’s frame-accurate. So PAL doesn’t need to deal with the “24p/24pa” situation we have in the US.
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The explanation I can offer is that you have to keep in mind that 24 is not 24, it’s 23.976. However, 25 *is* 25.000. None of the NTSC frame rates are running at their actual nominal speeds, they’re all slightly different — 30 is 29.97, 24 is 23.976, 48 is 47.952, and 60 is 59.94. But in the PAL camera, the frame rates are exact: 25.000, 50.000, etc. So it’s not a matter of simply reclocking for 25 in the HVX — because in the HVX it would actually record 24.975. That would not be PAL-compliant.
In the Sony and JVC multi-standard cameras, you can’t just swap between 50 and 60, or between 24 and 25. It requires a hard re-boot of the camera, turning the power off and rebooting into an alternate configuration — presumably to bring the other crystal on-line (or whatever needs to happen internally).
Which means the HVX would have to have been designed from the beginning with two crystals and two modes in mind. And it wasn’t. And it’s not a trivial matter of just adding another frame speed, because that would produce a system that’s incompatible with the other country’s television system (i.e., adding 24.000 to the PAL camera would seem easy enough, until you realize that the video shot in that mode wouldn’t be ATSC-compliant — so what good is it?) Or, adding 25 to the US version, as simply adding another frame rate between 24 and 26, would result in a frame rate that wouldn’t be EBU-compliant.
Now — with that said, if Europeans wanted 24.000 (and not 23.976) specifically and solely for film transfer possibilities, well, that would seem possible. It would not make footage that could be used in the US, but you could use it for film transfer. But I’d recommend you request it from http://www.panasonic-broadcast.com‘s forum right away — maybe there’s time to implement it, if they feel like it makes business sense to do so.
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To clarify, the HVX’s analog outputs can be configured to downconvert in-camera, so yes you could record on the DVCPRO50 deck directly from the camera. Obviously the deck can only record DVCPRO50, so you’d either want to set the camera to DV50 mode, or configure the analog outputs to downconvert into a signal that the deck supports.
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Right — I was amazed. A two-year-old 1.3ghz Powerbook G4 was able to handle full-screen, full-res, full-size realtime playback of a 100mbps DVCPRO-HD data stream. So yes, I’d say a top-of-the-line powerbook would be completely suitable and a totally workable edit station.
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Yes you can choose 180 degrees with all frame rates. And yes, the picture does get a little darker as you increase the frame rates. And yes, the other option is VIDEO CAM mode — which enables certain features, such as interval recording and loop recording, and replaces the “degrees” shutter method with actual fractions (i.e., 1/36.0 or 1/172.2 or whatever).
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[Gary Taylor] “Wasn’t some of the XL-H1 footage originally shot in HDV and then edited on DVCPRO HD? In particular I thought the Italian footage was shot in HDV.
That’s what they said at the booth. The Italian footage was shot in HDV, the Watchmaker footage was shot tethered to the DVCPRO-HD deck. Then it was all edited together and played back from DVCPRO-HD.
Because I also do a fair amount of studio shooting the XL-H1 looks like it will find a place in my collection, especially since Canon appears to have them available now in quantity.
Sounds like the XLH1 might be perfect for you.
Did you get a chance to do many comparisons between the two?”
No, not like I’d like to. I spent some time with the HVX against the FX1 and the HD100, and it was easily the class of that group. The Canon is in a whole different league from the FX1 and the HD100 though, and seems like a much more formidable competitor. I stared at the Trinitron at the Canon booth for quite a while, and I thought it acquitted itself very, very well. It’s definitely some beautiful high-def footage. I can’t wait to put them side-by-side and have some double-blind judges compare the footage.
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