[Bear Media]

You guys are awesome. Thank you very much, and I’ll try to keep you posted as this plays out.

Brad Bear
brad.bear@yahoo.com

[Bear Media]

Yeah, we didn’t sit in on this transfer. We’re going to when we have the scans made later in the process for the final online.

The camera does have registration pins. Honestly, you have to really stare hard at the film to notice the motion. I argue that it is the nature of film, because we’ve compared it to S35 footage we’ve shot and major motion pictures. There is an inherent “breathing” in film. Ours is just ever so slightly more. It doesn’t really show up on under cranked shots though.

There was no mention of any problems on the notes from the transfer. We trust the transfer house, they caught problems early on that we had fixed, and then retested with a perfect report.

We both come from video production backgrounds and were not familiar with our NTSC Digibeta decks using 24fps. I just wanted to ask in case I had missed something.

To answer the other post response in this thread:

We’re mastering on HDcam SR, but we wanted the most image control possible in post so we went with film. Film is also the most forgiving in our circumstances. We’re shooting a doc, and have been bouncing around the globe uncertain of the conditions we would be in. We are also shooting a little with the HVX200 and, for extremely long interviews, the Sony F900 – But 90% percent of the project is originated on film. The other reasons behind going film are purely emotional. We really wanted to originate a feature on film, and once the story came along that we couldn’t stop thinking about, we started.

This issue, of the jitter, just came up when we got the dailies back on Digibeta. I wanted to ask to better inform our decisions moving forward. We may have to rent a newer Arri package.

Brad Bear
brad.bear@yahoo.com

[Bear Media]

I agree. Seems like you have a haunted camera. I haven’t had any problems with my camera since the replacement.

– Brad

[Bear Media]

Yeah. The demo has a rather crude watermark in the center of the image, but you can still get a good idea of how the compression will look on a project.

[Bear Media]

I actually compressed an HD quicktime reference file last night. The project was only 6 minutes long, but BitVise does the scale down so you don’t have to output any intermediate file before hand. The result was stunning as usual. Transitions, solid colors, gradients, and Text were all crisp and clean. I’m blown away by the quality that encoder puts out.

I’ve never been all that happy with any jobs I’ve had to output with compressor.

[Bear Media]

I’ve switched over from Compressor to Bit Vise Mpeg2 encoder. I had to find something that handled dissolves and text well, and I’ve been blown away. I ran into a situation that required a quick turn around on compressing two feature length docs (90 mins each) without the budget to go to a compression house. The quality has exceeded my expectations on every front.

You may want to check into it. Google BitVise encoder, and try out the demo.

Hope this helps.

[Bear Media]

Thank you.

I don’t know why I wasn’t able to find that before.

I’m going to look into the Decklink line first. Does Final Cut recognize this hardware? Do you use any of these?

Thanks,
Brad

Brad Bear
brad.bear@yahoo.com

[Bear Media]

Just a follow up on my issues with the HVX200. I exchanged the camera and have no problems with the new one. Everything works great now.

Must have just been a bad apple in the bunch. Judging that no one has had this same problem, it seems like it was a very rare problem – which makes me happy.

Thank you all for your help, especially Jan.

Take Care,
Brad

[Bear Media]

Is this just a reference monitor, or can you dial it in and trust it to be accuratly displaying what the camera is recording?

Thanks,
Brad

[Bear Media]

Thank you for responding so quickly Jan. That was great advice, and certainly some I was not aware of.

I tried everything you said above. I turned on all hidden folders and files, and only the contents folder and Last Clip file was on the card. I made sure that the write protect was on – Still no go, at least consistently.

The card – with the same information on it as yesterday – initially transfered to the HDD, 3.09GB took 5 minutes the first time, transferred a second time with no changes, same 3.09GB took about 7 minutes.

I unmounted the card from the computer, unprotected it, shot about 3GB more footage, write protected the card, hooked the camera back into the computer, made sure that there were no OS files on the card from indexing, and began the transfer. 6.69GB from the card reported that it would take 37 minutes to transfer, but locked up completely with about 12 minutes to go.

– Brad

Brad Bear brad.bear@yahoo.com