[Doug Dillaman]

Thanks anyway – glad to get help so quickly!

[Doug Dillaman]

That’s EXACTLY it! Thanks so much!

[Doug Dillaman]

toggle absolutely did it! (Well, at least this first time.) thanks heaps, glad to know I’m not alone …

[Doug Dillaman]

(cross-post, hopefully useful anyway …)

exactly – it’s disc-based media, which generally means it’s much easier to work with than tape in a post workflow (each button on/off is a new chapter). I haven’t used in on FCP, but I have used it with Avid on three big shows and like it a lot, and several DOPs in NZ swear by it (I get the impression it’s made a lot more inroads here than overseas). One nice advantage is that it creates proxies that can be used for easy viewing by directors for paper-edits with some viewer software.

And I love the look of it – the colors I see off it are just beautiful. Individual mileage may vary, of course.

For any standard def show where you can afford the cameras and a deck, I’d be pretty strongly tempted to go XDCam. I don’t really know anything about what’s going on with it in hi-def, so not qualified to comment one way or another.

(I believe there are some ways you can get yourself in danger if you edit off proxies and try to link up later, so do test your post workflow, of course …)

[Doug Dillaman]

hey Nick, loving this side of the Tasman … haven’t made it to your side yet, shamefully enough. Hoping to visit in 2008!

Thanks for the advice, everybody.

[Doug Dillaman]

i believe there are 2 states that DONT have sales tax.
New Hampshire is one.

The other is Oregon. I’ll be spending a week there. It’s where I bought my last Mac – I’m actually a US citizen who’s become an NZ resident recently.

Cheers for the other advice – I’ll give a good think to the 15 vs. 17 inch issue.

[Doug Dillaman]

We have a Blackmagic card, not a Kona, but I assume the same principle should work … assuming the deck we’re borrowing has HD-SDI outs and not just firewire. I’ll find out soon.

[Doug Dillaman]

The timelines are DVCPRO-HD. Small amounts of HDV will be intercut.

When you say DIGITIZE, do you mean that during the capture process save it as DVCPRO-HD? I was planning on digitizing as HDV and transcoding, but that would save a step, if it’s reliable.

[Doug Dillaman]

We have the same sync problem with the Varicam at 25fps.
Pseudokiwi, do you capture the embedded sound, or do you merge your audio from other media [harddisk/dvd-r/…] ???
We sync our separate audio source with the video footage, so we never were shure it was a timecode, varicam, fcp or blackmagic. But if you have the same problems AND you use the tape-audio, then we kwow it’s not the soundrecorder or timecode.

Sorry for the late reply – my e-mail is a war zone at the moment and haven’t had time to come back … to answer, we capture the sound off of the tape.

I suspect this may be a blackmagic issue.

[Doug Dillaman]

… except I’m not using Firewire, I’m using HD-SDI through BlackMagic. The tapes are captured now (we couldn’t wait any longer or afford to rent a different deck, if we could even find one available – not many in NZ) so it’s just going to be a manual sync for the project, which is a nightmare, but oh well. I suspect it’s something to do with 25 frame support for DVCPRO-HD.