[Craig Seeman]

Received this email from Hit Film today about fan film cut with it.

[Craig Seeman]

It’s not clear what your needs are and do you anticipate any changes.
The EX3 has an interchangeable lens. The X160 does not so perhaps that’s not a factor. The 300K1 does.
There the X180 as well as the X200 but if you didn’t like the X160 you may not like those either.

Do you anticipate the need for 4K?
Are interchangeable lenses a factor?

You might consider the FS5 or FS7

[Craig Seeman]

I was tempted to get it at MicroCenter but Apple Insider had a $500 off all models at B&H. Less of a discount but more useful as I was able to buy the base model with the upgraded 64 Vega for just $100 over the base model price which I felt would be more useful to me in the long run.

[Craig Seeman]

Apparently I’m alone in this or everyone is using Display Port to USB-C.

In any case I found I had to reverse the cable and push very hard to snap in.
This is not something I needed to do using my Apple TB3 cable which doesn’t seem to “lock” like the USB-C cable does. It might just be the specific manufacture’s cable.

[Craig Seeman]

SliceX, TrackX updated January 17 not recent enough?
https://coremelt.com/pages/downloads

There’s CrumplePop’s Easy Tracker also updated in January.
https://fxfactory.com/info/easytracker/

Not sure about how website updates have much to do with product updates.

[Craig Seeman]

It used to be when ISP data rates were low, serious data caps, limited email attachment sizes before the days of things like drop box, one would be trying to squeeze quality out of every frame. Mobile devices needed separate encodes. None of this is really necessary anymore.

At comparatively high data rates everything looks good. Very little tweaking is needed for backward compatibility.
Everything is H.264 High Profile CABAC entropy with lots of GOP flexibility. This may get even easier with HEVC.

For broadcast, inexpensive codes have preset to delivery to correct MXF if that’s what they need, otherwise it’s Apple ProRes and their preconfigured hardware or cloud based “Flippers” do the rest.

There’s certainly still a big (and growing) market for high end enterprise encoders like Vantage or Elemental but even those may be preset based with workflow level configuration for multiple output types and destinations where that’s often still mission critical. It’s just not as important for the end user.

On the other hand I still see people who don’t understand the basics, encoding files that take far longer to upload than they should or who still don’t understand why their files look bad when crushed too small without understanding their content and target destination needs. Basically these days it’s people who don’t understand what the presets mean and which is the best to pick for a given situation.

[Craig Seeman]

The Panasonic HVX 200 presents two serious problems. It does not have HDMI out. The Firewire out in HD is DVCProHD, not HDV so even most legacy Firewire devices often only supported DV or HDV. The camera does have component, composite and S – Video analog out but they may only be standard definition which would be 480i.

Wirecast doesn’t support DVCProHD over Firewire (it wasn’t a widely used format compared to DV and HDV) and no longer support HDV either since that involved licensed technology.

Blackmagic Intensity to USB3 may work but the device isn’t very reliable in my experience.

The Inogeni VGA to USB3 can handle analog sources.

In short
Computers no longer have Firewire inputs
There’s not much demand for Firewire to USB3 convertors (there are a few Firewire to Thunderbolt adaptors. Apple makes one). Firewire to Firewire computers didn’t require a convertor so there never was a market for much else during that period.
DVCProHD was exclusive to Panasonic and was much less common than HDV. I don’t know of any devices that would go DVCProHD to USB3.
If you’re left with analog to USB3 you’re probably better off buying an HD camera with HDMI out. HDMI to USB3 devices are commonly available.

Personally I’d say this is the wrong camera for quality live streaming especially if you want HD. Even a decent modern prosumer camera may give you better results and easier to connect to a computer.

[Craig Seeman]

There’s stuff like Wonder Share
Their reputation is shady enough that COW prevents me from including the link.

But I wouldn’t trust it. Perhaps you can copy the file and test with a copy using their free trial.
Programs like that might just fix simple EOF issues. File damage can be very complex though.
Companies like Aeroquartet find patterns in the problem and implement repair based on the patterns of damage found. Alas if there were cheap good and reliable methods than companies like Aeorquartet wouldn’t be able to survive.

[Craig Seeman]

There’s stuff like this.

But I wouldn’t trust it. Perhaps you can copy the file and test with a copy using their free trial.
Programs like that might just fix simple EOF issues. File damage can be very complex though.
Companies like Aeroquartet find patterns in the problem and implement repair based on the patterns of damage found. Alas if there were cheap good and reliable methods than companies like Aeorquartet wouldn’t be able to survive.

[Craig Seeman]

Aeorquartet specializes in repairing various camera card files

DVCProHD on P2 cards for example.

They have a free Mac based utility that will check the files for reparability and then charge a fee for service based the repair.