Dylan Reeve
Forum Replies Created
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Problem is that the only way to shoot 25p without the HDX900 (which is not widely available here) is as offspeed on a Varicam. Making 25p/60. This is apparently a pretty common desire in PAL countries.
Yes the 1400 can play it over firewire, but that’s no help when nothing (so far) can digitise it.
I just can’t imagine why. It can’t be that much more complicated?
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“Not if the camera and deck are set correctly- FCP 6 does support 720p25 and the Software FRC NOW supports 25p workflows. the article you ref is out of date.”
That has not been my experience – I spent close to 8 hours going through every combination I could find on the Deck and in FCP.
There is NO WAY to capture 720p25/60 via Firewire in FCP. It can’t be done. As cofe has mentioned, FCP simply doesn’t support the 60Hz system frequency (which is the required setting on the Varicam to record 25fps).
“Only in NA, in the rest of the world the camera lays 50p to tape.”
Based on my discussions with Panasonic NZ (and there have been many now) – the only model Panasonic have that records 25p over 50 is the HDX900. As these cameras are pretty new, most people, at least here, are recording 25p/60.
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Even capturing at 60fps (or 59.94) FCP will only allow coversions to NTSC framerates. From there, apparently you then have to use CinemaTools to retime the clip to 25fps.
It’s detailed at the Outpost Blog.
Overall, that’s not a workflow that is practical with 50+ hours of reality material.
Running the deck in it’s hardware FRC mode (called ’25HD’) is interesting. It delivered 1080i50 via HD-SDI then, upconverting on the fly. However I have no idea at all what’s coming out the Firewire in that mode. I certainly couldn’t get FCP to play nice with it.
Currently, as the show will be mastered in 1080i50 anyway, we’re using the ’25HD’ mode to capture via HD-SDI with a Decklink HD Extreme to 1080i50. This mode appears to provide us with reasonable good video quality (the upconversion is nice) and accurate timecode (which is not vital, but makes me feel better).
Given that there’s only one camera (I believe) that shoots 720p25/50 (the HDX900) I imagine still that the majority of DVCPRO HD 720p25 is over 60.
I can’t see any reason, technically, that it should be any harder to extract the 25 active frames, over Firewire, from a 60p stream than from a 50p stream. I mean FCP can get all the active frames from the stream using it’s Framerate Conversion Tool but insists on making a clip with an NTSC framerate.
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Another option would be to make some sort of intermediate layer that would interface between the database and the AE script.
As AE has a socket function, I am planning to do something a bit like this with an HTTP request to a PHP script that will return text data formatted to generate results.
You could also probably make some sort of application that would generate text files for your script to read in.
I don’t believe there is a way to directly interface with a database (although I imagine it might be possible on some level) or to execute a program and capture the output.
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Another option, if you can find one, is to use a Digital8 camcorder – they play Hi8 and Video8 over firewire.
But if you can’t find one, then a daisy-chain through any DV camcorder will work (assuming it has analogue inputs, most do).
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This is something the editors here do in our downtime, we come up with new countdown IDs…
The rule (for us at least) is that we normally count from 10 seconds to 2 seconds (although we only display the 2 second count for a single frame, the “two pip”). It is important that it be clear when each number ‘hits’.
So for example we have a flying skulls one, where a variety of neon skulls with a number in them fly toward camera, at eight seconds to go, then 9 second skull has faded and is flying past camera, and the eight second skull flicks up really bright as it flys toward camera.
There is another where the numbers, 10-2 are lined up along the top of the screen in a mid-grey colour, as each second comes up that number flashes bright white, then slowly fades out before the next number comes up.
And there are a bunch of others. Basically they are all blank except for the company logo and contact details. We then overlay basic text with production details when we put it on the tape.
The standard here is generally:
00:58:30:00 Bars and Tone
00:59:30:00 Black/Silence
00:59:45:00 ID Board begins
00:59:50:00 ID Board countdown begins
00:59:58:00 2 pip
00:59:58:01 Black/Silence
01:00:00:00 Start of Message/ProgrammeFor some networks we are required to have 30 seconds of ID board (we generally still only count the last ten seconds) and some people start at 10:00:00:00 – but that’s generally how we do it.
We get ideas from all over the place… All that really matters is that it counts evenly and that it’s clear what number is being displayed at each second. Beyond that, it’s just whatever we find entertaining or pretty when we make them (we just have a tape of ID board countdowns we pick from and add to when we create new ones)
Have fun, it’s not rocket science.
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As well as the other suggestions, you may also be discovering the downside of most plasma monitors/tvs – they have really heavy imagm processing circutry that can often act to highlight any imperfections in the video – watching commercial DVDs on plasmas can be painful as the MPEG blocking becomes much more obviously and low-bandwidth satellite TV is just terrible often.
These things tend to be ‘softened’ out by the analogue nature of CRT TVs but become much more obviously on digitally processed displays such as plasmas.
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Wow, that’s neat, it’s an effect I must now try to reproduce for myself.. Unfortunately I have neither of the cameras required.
I will just stick to dropping the camera for the cool breakup pattern effect.
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Genarts Sapphire Plugins are pretty nifty (although many are somewhat niche):
https://www.genarts.com/sapphire-avx.html -
Indeed. Although the Animatte plugin can be pretty hard to work with.
If it got to that stages I would be moving the shots to something like After Effects or Combustion to do them. Animatte just become a bit nightmarish with lots of points and keyframes.