[Bill Marcellus]

OK, I’ll bite. Why wouldn’t you recommend capturing directly to a laptop? More chance of dropped frames due to other CPU processes going on?

Bill

[Bill Marcellus]

Tony,

Thanks for your help. We are planning to use the RAID with FCP on the G5- not with the Media 100. I guess we are putting that on the shelf.

Thanks again.

Bill

[Bill Marcellus]

I have suggested a blind test of SD vs. HD downconverted but it really appears almost as easy to go ahead and simply cut in 720p so I think that is the direction we are going to take. We are going to shoot some tests next week. I’ll post if we find any anomalies or complications.

Thanks again for your help!

Bill

[Bill Marcellus]

Jeremy,

That makes sense to me. I guess that I didn’t realize that the data rate of 720p was low enough to edit via FW800.

Thanks for your help.

Bill

[Bill Marcellus]

Obviously, one could shoot SD. The director for the project I am currently involved in insists on acquiring HD footage for the extra resolution it offers even after downconverting to SD. I cannot argue that the resulting SD image will be slightly better than it would be if shot natively in SD.

I would like to downconvert the footage prior to editing primarily to save disk space and to eliminate the need for a RAID during the editing process. Since this project will result in 10 hours of final, edited program material, the storage requirements at HD resolution for all of the raw takes is substantial- even if the shooting ratio stays low- on the order of 3 to 1, etc.

We are also interested in the workflow others are using to create “safeties” of footage acquired onto P2 cards. Our current thought is that we will need to copy all of the raw files from the P2 cards onto multiple external drives for archival purposes.

At this point in time it appears that there is no simple workflow to downconvert HD 720p captured on P2 cards to SD prior to editing. Is this correct?

Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated.

Bill

[Bill Marcellus]

John, you said it much better then I did- thanks!

We are also concerned about the most efficient way to archive a safety copy of the footage and are particularly interested in what others are doing in the way of on-set workflow. What real-world transfer speeds are others seeing from P2 cards into the P2 store? And also from the P2 store out to a laptop?

As far as I know there currently is no VTR-like hardware device that will output downconverted SD from a P2 source. Am I missing something?

Thanks again for any help or suggestions.

Bill

[Bill Marcellus]

Thanks for your fast responses guys. Walter, I was also surprised by the 24p requirement when I received the network specs yesterday. I wonder if anyone else has encountered this spec? Its for Lifetime BTW.

Bill

[Bill Marcellus]

Yes- I forgot to say I am running Tiger.

Bill

[Bill Marcellus]

I have a dual 2.7 w/4 gigs of RAM and AE 6.5 is working fine for me. I know that this doesn’t help solve your problem but at least you know it CAN work properly.

Bill

[Bill Marcellus]

Peter,

We won’t be shipping it- just moving it between two facilities in the same city. I am very interested in hearing about that design flaw you found!

Bill