Don Greening
Forum Replies Created
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[mike faulkner] “which is best?”
That’s not an easy question. What’s best for some may not be what’s best for you. You have to ask yourself what type of shooting you’re going to be doing and then apply that to the feature sets of these two cameras.
The X7E looks like it will be a great camera along with the bigger shoulder mount version. Interchangable lens? Nice, although I’m betting that 90% of the folks who buy this camera will never change a lens. Record to flash cards as well as tape? More nice stuff.
The X7E won’t be as good in low light as the EX1 will. But if you’re always shooting with your own light source then this isn’t an issue. The EX1 will have a more shallow DOF because of the larger sensors, but if the operator doesn’t care about that, then……
The EX1 shoots using a higher quality codec, Think of it as HDV on steroids. For myself, I need the best low light HD camera I can afford and am not worried about changing lenses. I’m an event shooter, not a movie maker, so I chose the EX1. It will take some time to get the SxS Pro memory card workflow in place but I’m well on my way in that respect.
Choose the camera that’s right for you.
If you’re referring to the San Disk cards for the EX, then no they’re not available yet.
– Don
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[john] “We put some full res 1080 images up at http://www.hd24p.com“
Nice! I’ve bookmarked your site. Still waiting for my EX to show up. Good luck with your workflows. I’ll be keeping an eye on how you do and offering any assistance I can.
– Don
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[sailor] “On the XH A1, if I down-convert in-camera, will capturing and editing be exactly the same as capturing and editing mini DV footage?”
Yes, it will be the same.
[sailor] “Will it be as if I shot the footage on a non-HDV camera?”
Yes, although you may find the quality a bit better than DV25 because the HD footage will have more information to start with.
– Don
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[Ryan Santos] “When a camera vigenettes, what is the most common culprit?”
The lens, when it’s pulled back full wide.
– Don
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Just a thought, but perhaps running DiskWarrior might be helpful. This app will create a new directory on your Xserve RAID. Your existing directory may have some corruption (happens over time) that’s making life difficult for FCP.
And as Jeremy stated, the most recent software updates have made life easier for a lot of FCP users, including myself.
– Don
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The rotation speed (7200rpm) of your USB drive is fast enough but the fact that it’s a USB drive is not so good. It’s generally considered that a USB connection cannot sustain the transfer rates needed to edit with, even if you’re editing DV25 (DV NTSC) which has the lowest video bit stream of all the video codecs. Even though you may not be having editing issues now, you would be if you’re trying to edit multiple streams of video down the road and not having dropped frames during playback.
Minimum recommendation for DV NTSC editing is to use firewire 400 or 800 hard drives. You never said what your aquisition format was but you did mention that you’re trying to play back an uncompressed version of your project which is definitely too high a video stream for your USB drive to manage. It’s even too high of a transfer rate for firewire. As I said in my previous post, in order to play back even one stream of uncompressed you need a hard drive array, made up of 4 or 5 SATA-type hard drives all working together and acting as one hard drive.
These days, with new codecs such as Apple’s ProRes 422 and ProRes 422 HQ (the HD version) it sort of makes using uncompressed obsolete. The beauty of this new codec is that it’s virtually identical to uncompressed, creates much lower file sizes AND with much lower transfer rates, so much lower in fact, that it’s almost in firewire editing territory.
ProRes 422 is available starting in FCP 6 and if you have this version you owe it to yourself to try it out.
Hope this helps.
– Don
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[Frank Cervarich] “Will I be able to move those projects and their files into my new system and get them running in Leopard/FCS2?”
Of course. Once you have your new Mac/FCS2 ready to go probably the easiest way to transfer files from your G4 is to connect the two computers via an ethernet cable and transfer away.
[Frank Cervarich] “Also, will I be able to move old files in general into this new system”
Yes. I file share all the time between a G4, G5, Macbook Pro and Mac Pro via ethernet. There are no issues from tranferring actual files between PowerPC systems and Intel systems as long as you don’t expect programs from your G4 to run on your Intel MacPro.
– Don
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[Craig Seeman] “I do think 4:2:0 (especially progressive) will key well.”
Like my fellow Canadian is oft quoted as saying: “Not all compression is bad” 🙂
– Don
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[Katy Delahay] “The images sticks after a few seconds and the audio is really jerky.”
The playback of your exported clips is totally dependant on the transfer rate of the hard drive(s) you’ve exported the clips to. Uncompressed video needs a high transfer rate, much more than the compressed clips you were probably editing with. For example, if you’ve exported your uncompressed clips to your startup drive and are trying to play them back it won’t work because the hard drive is too slow. Uncompressed video playback needs a RAID array made up of 4 or 5 hard drives minimum.
– Don