[Don Greening]

Yeah, I noticed that too. Which bears out what one of the HD experts (Gary Adcock) has been preaching for awhile now: “Interlaced is a delivery format, not an acquisition format.” I can sort of understand why the Survivor crew is doing what they’re doing because it’s probably not a big deal to do an interlaced version with something like a KONA 3 board at the same time they’re printing a show to tape.

Shooting progressive will future-proof the show for LCD and plasma screens as well as pulling good stills from the footage. Since the PDW-700 cameras don’t shoot native 24p without an add-on piece of firmware (and a PC board too, I think) worth around 4 grand and change their 16 cameras are probably shooting 1080p 30. I don’t even know if the PC board is available yet.

– Don

[Don Greening]

They’re using PDW-700’s and editing on Avid Unity/Media Composer in LA. I don’t know about how they’re getting a shallow DOF. More info here:

https://digitalcontentproducer.com/hdhdv/depth/dirt_on_survivor_in_hd1014/index.html

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Chris Cooke] “I guess XDCAM Transfer only recognizes that specific folder name. “

Correct. If the name “BPAV” is altered in any way the workflow process will grind to an immediate halt. Always create a uniquely named parent folder for every BPAV folder.

– Don

[Don Greening]

$42,000.00 for the 800.

https://news.creativecow.net/story/861619

– Don

[Don Greening]

In Final Cut Pro highlight all the clips in the timeline you want to apply visible TC to and apply the timecode reader filter to the selected clips. Not the timecode generator filter. There’s 2 of them so be sure you don’t get them mixed up:

• 1. TC reader will use each clip’s TC and display that on screen. The TC will change for each different clip in the timeline.
• 2. TC generator will start at the the beginning of your sequence with 00:00:00;00 and use the length of the sequence for its finishing numbers.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Here’s you answer as of May 18th last year. I don’t know if anything has changed much since then:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/124/868640

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Stephen May] “If they can do that in a still camera, why aren’t they making something like that in a full out HD camera with the XLR jacks etc.? “

I’m sure your wish will be granted soon enough. Up until now the reason only 1/3″ chips were being used in small handycam-style cameras was because of heat. CCD’s use more power and therefore generate more heat than CMOS. So now we have 1/2″ chips in a hand-held that generate the same heat as the older CCD cameras.

Onward and upward.

– Don

[Don Greening]

You may find this interesting.

There are 2 things Sony does to reduce ambient noise on the EX CMOS chip.

1. Each photosite has its own amplifier and the micro-voltages from each one are sampled twice for every field/frame. The first time is with no light hitting the photosite so ambient voltages can be measured i.e. picture noise. The second time is when there is light hitting the photosite. The first set of values is then subtracted from the second set to get rid of the noise.

2. The A/D converter is actually part of the imaging chip instead of being on a separate device. This helps to stop noise and EM interference during the A/D conversion. In fact, there is a separate A/D converter for each column of photosites, so in the case of the EX chip there are 1920 A/D converters on each imager.

These are the two major principles behind Sony’s EXMOR™ CMOS technology. Cool, huh?

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Atticus Culver-Rease] “what I’m trying to find out is whether you can re-link offline clips via the BPAV structure”

No. Already answered in my first post: “The current version of FCP will only recognize EX footage within a QT wrapper and doesn’t know what a BPAV folder is.”

[Atticus Culver-Rease] “If I can’t re-link via the BPAVs then when it comes time to archive a project it seems like you’re basically stuck archiving twice as much media since you have to back up your original “shot tapes” (BPAVs) as well as the QT-wrapped versions of the same media in your capture scratch. “

Yes! Or dump your “QT-wrapped versions of the same media” and re-do the import from the BPAV folders with the Sony Transfer Tool if you have to re-visit the project at a later date. But by then FCP will most likely be able to work with the native .mp4 files. But not today.

– Don

[Don Greening]

1) Editing long GOP EX stuff by it’s very nature is less dependent upon the speed of your editing RAID (although it doesn’t hurt to have a fast one) and has more to do with the processing power of your workstation. So if you’ve not seen a big difference between working in a native EX timeline and a ProRes one it’s probably because your machine is up to the task. If you know FCP then you also know that there’s at least 3 or 4 ways of doing the same job, depending on how you like to work. Working in an EX native timeline is fine but when your projects become graphics-heavy then you need to consider changing to a Pro-Res workflow to keep everything looking good. If time is money for you then transcoding to ProRes will be faster with hardware solutions such as an AJA KONA board or a Matrox MXO2, etc. just to speed up the process. Something to consider. Otherwise working with EX footage is dirt simple. Just think of the EX as HDV on steroids.

2) No experience so no suggestions.

3) For archiving you need to keep the BPAV folders for sure. Think “new video tape.” The Sony Transfer Tool and/or Log and Capture Tool’s job is to turn the native EX files into something that FCP can understand and subsequently edit with. The current version of FCP will only recognize EX footage within a QT wrapper and doesn’t know what a BPAV folder is. So archive your BPAV folders and after your project is complete you can trash your transcoded media if you want because you can always go back to the BPAV folders for your material. Some folks (like myself) will archive both the BPAV folders and the transcoded media. Keep in mind that whatever clips are re-wrapped for FCP editing are not necessarily the same thing that other NLE’s need to edit EX footage with. Down the road you might want to edit the same stuff on an AVID or Premiere etc, so hence the importance of keeping the BPAV folders.

Yes, people use Blu-ray for archiving to avoid the hard drive backup thing. You can burn Blu-ray on your Mac using Toast10® if you want an inexpensive program for this purpose. For myself I’m waiting for the firmware to be updated on Sony’s PDW-U1 XDCAM reader/writer so 50 Gbytes of any type of file can be archived on XDCAM disc.

– Don