David Wulzen
Forum Replies Created
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It sounds like a Final Cut setting and not your footage…
You need to either set your sequence settings to Anamorphic before you drop your footage into the timeline, or if you open up the clip in your Viewer, and find the Distort column in the Motion tab, you can adjust the aspect ratio to make it 16:9. I can’t remember offhand, but you change the Aspect Ratio to 33, 0, or -33….one of those should do the trick and you’ll know when you got it right.
-David Wulzen
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Yes, the plan was definitely to capture the Canon material at 720p60 to match with the DVCPro HD material.
So I’ve been running a couple tests, shooting with all three of the Canon frame rates (60i, 30f, 24f), and have been ingesting through the Kona 3 at 720p60 (there have been some issues with deck control, but I’ll get to that in a second). So far it appears that each of the frame rates are capturing perfectly, even if the tape jumps from one to another without a break. All of them seem to match perfectly with the previous 720p material. Weird (?) but good.
For the mean time before I can purchase a HDV deck, I’ve been using the HD-SDI out of the XH, but I can’t get any deck control via Firewire. Any suggestions?
Thanks for all your help you two.
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That certainly makes the most sense, but (just for argument’s sake) is it any more of a headache to shoot 30f?
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I ended up figuring out how to do it, by using a text editor to alter the data in the XML files. By changing the value of “Start Timecode” from hour 1 to 2 at the point of corruption, and for each file from there on out, I now have the two sections I was looking for.
Thanks for all of your help and suggestions Jeremy and John.
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This is what I’m trying to avoid. I DO want to affect the P2 data, and not what I transfer.
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Are you talking about within the Log and Transfer window? That function is grayed out.
Also, all of my files within that P2 folder are unlocked, FYI.
And if I modify the time code once I’ve logged the footage, will that permanently change the P2 metadata?
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Yep. Is there a setting within FC to alter the information?
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Hi Kim-
Again, I think we are more or less in the same boat. Currently I also do all (well, most, depending on the project) of our DVD encoding through an Optibase hardware encoder straight from the DigiBeta master. Compressor works alright but it also takes up time from my edit machine and honestly I have never gotten it to look as good as what I can get out of a hardware based encoder.
Maybe someone with more experience can chime in, but it sounds like the best option still resides in getting a Kona 3 card, and having that flexibility of doing down/up/cross conversions. By keeping your existing DigiBeta decks hooked up, you can take your HD master and downconvert it to a SD DigiBeta for DVD encoding. Granted, this does create one more step in the process, but I think it would yield the best results.
I guess I should also ask if you were planning on making an SD master tape for archiving as well? If you are then it almost seems like a given to go this way. If not, well, then it’s still an option.
One thing I don’t know however is whether or not an HD hardware encoder would have the capability to make an SD version off of your HD master. My guess is no, but if somebody knows…
How are you doing archiving at the moment? That would be a good place to start.
-David Wulzen
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[Before I start, I would cross-post this in both the FCP and Kona forums. There are a lot more, and experienced, minds in both]
Surprisingly enough, I’m in almost the same exact boat as you. I also work for a non-profit with a huge archive of footage, mostly on BetaSP for some of the older material, working up to DigiBeta for the last several years or so. We are slowly working our way into the HD field, emphasis on the slowly…
In our quest to search for the proper HD format to shoot in, for ease of use and relative low cost hardware wise, we have been shooting in Panasonic’s P2 format with an HVX-200. Personally this poses a couple issues, especially when it comes to combining the newly acquired HD content with the existing SD material, as well as the matter of archiving. One step at a time though.
I work with FCP, importing through a Kona LHe, which for the most part does everything I need it to do, execept for seamlessly combining HD and SD. I should start off too by saying I don’t know the ins and outs (no pun intended) of the Kona IO, but I believe it’s in the same boat as the LHe, if not worse off. If you are shooting HD in a P2 format, and want to combine it with SD footage, I have found one viable (and realistic) option, and that involves downconverting your HD content to a Digibeta through a Kona card and then re-capturing it into an SD timeline with your pre-existing SD footage.
Needless to say, this is not ideal. In my situation, we are shooting one to three hour interviews and this is a huge consumer of time when dealing with several of these. Ok, plan two:
Get a Kona 3 card, and upconvert all of your SD footage to match your recently shot HD content. That way you can work natively with P2 material using log and transfer (already a time saver) and you aren’t doing mass downconversions to tape. Herein lies the issue though: archiving.
Granted, digital storage is becoming cheaper and cheaper, but on a personal level keeping all of your footage archived in a digital format such as P2, no matter how many different locations you store it, makes me unspeakably nervous. You will find just as many people out there that feel the opposite, but it freaks me out.
Soooo, here’s my suggestion, which is the direction I think we are going to head in as well: move to HD Cam, get a Kona 3 card to do up/down/cross conversions across both SD and HD formats, and get a legacy VTR that can play and record HD Cam, as well as do playback of DigiBeta. This is by no means the cheapest way to do things, and will continue to keep costs up since you are not moving in a tapeless direction, however I think it gives you the best of both worlds. And if you do shoot anything in P2, you can still maintain the HD quality (and your peace of mind) by dumping it off to an HD Cam tape for archival purposes.
I hope that this wasn’t too longwinded, and if anyone reading this has any input as well, I’m more than happy to hear it. This is only one way of looking at things, and if there is one thing I have learned making the transition to HD is that there are endless combinations depending on your situation.
Good luck and keep me posted!
-David Wulzen
Editor/Assistant Producer, Film and Video
Experience Music Project
Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame
Seattle, WA -
This is the direction that I am leaning towards. The only downside to recapturing to digibeta is the time it takes to do so. Most, if not all, of the footage we shoot are interviews, ranging from 30 minutes to three hours, so it creates a slight hiccup in workflow to run it all out to tape. It does, however, create a much better looking image that trying to do any other codec conversion either through Final Cut or Compressor (as far as my testing as shown).
As far whether or not to edit in SD or HD, that is yet to be determined, but esentially I’m open to either depending on ease of combining the two medias. It seems to make sense to do an entirely HD edit, given the situation where I work. Since at the moment we are only delivering in SD, we can edit in HD and have the Kona do the downcoversion of the whole project. But when we are ready to do a HD delivery, we have the project already there, rather than having to do any conversion/recapturing to get it back up to HD. Does that seem like a reasonable assumption, or am I missing something? (I think this addresses your last point about getting the SD footage back to SD after it has been upconverted…but I could be misunderstanding your point)
Hypothetically, if we did end up shooting the P2 footage 24pn, how would we work around that? Can you do any framerate conversion of the digibeta footage when capturing to match the P2? Or would you be forced to downcovert the P2 to digibeta letting the Kona add a pulldown to get it to 29.97? (I’m starting to learn the uses of pulldown, so I don’t know if that’s even a possibility)
Thank you very much for your insight, and any more you could possibly give would be greatly appreciated.