Eric Hansen
Forum Replies Created
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i havent tried the timecode sync, so i can’t answer your question on that, but i can tell you to avoid Sony Premium tape at all costs. it drops out like crazy. we use Sony Excellence and havent had any dropout issues. i spoke with a Sony rep and he told me that the Sony tapes that are priced above the Excellence, namely the DVCAM and Digital Master tapes use a very similar (in some cases identical) tape formulation as the Excellence tape. so basically the increase in price is due to a nicer case and marketing.
btw, we use Sony tapes because i’ve had issues in the past with Sony not repairing a camera or deck because they believed that a non Sony tape caused the issue. i dont know if other manufacturers are like this. but i will say that i used the Panasonic Master tape for years in a previous job and they worked great and i didnt have any issues.
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thanks gary, i’m glad i got corrected on the HDCAM SR point because my experience with that deck has been very limited and i dont know about all of its options. we were thinking about going that route with our 16mm archive, but we decided against it in the short term because of cost. but we will probably revisit it in the future. our in-house deck is the HDW-M2000/10. we wouldnt switch to SR unless a significant project came along that would justify the cost.
when you record 720p, what is the total capacity of the tape? i assume that it would increase, like HDCAM where a 40 min tape holds 50 min of 24psf. or does the deck not record like that?
david, i should also add that Quantum will let you demo the 600A.
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i’ve only tried the “record to laptop-attached firewire drive” twice. it worked the first time as a test with plenty of extra bandwidth, so i took it to an interview to get 1080p24 (over 60) into Final Cut. i only have 4GB P2 cards. during the interview it dropped frames constantly and i couldnt figure out why because it worked just fine during the initial test. i switched to 720p24 and used the 4GB cards to get through the interview. i havent tried it since. i’m going to buy (and rent) a bunch of 16GB P2 cards instead.
i’ve heard that the DV Rack and PC laptop system is great, especially in getting a nice HD preview, but i think i’m going to stick with the cards considering the places my company tends to shoot – mountains, deserts, definitely not studios.
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the horror stories you speak of, i remember well. but they are most likely referring to DLT tapes and drives that maxed out at 80GB compressed (DLT III and IV) and were used mostly for office data backup or DVD Replication (which we still use one for). SDLT is a much different and more robust system. like comparing DVCAM to HDCAM and saying they are the same since they are both video tape and are part of Sony’s CAM system.
laying off to HDCAM SR is a very expensive alternative especially since a $70 SDLT tape can hold 14 hours of 720p24 or 5 hours of 1080i60. i would suggest regular HDCAM if you want to go this route since the benefits of SR are lost, IMHO, on P2 originated footage (for example SR is 4:4:4 but DVCPRO HD is 4:2:2). i have colleagues who do this, but i feel that its unnecessary.
LTO is actually a great tape system and what our telecine company uses. but you have to decide what you’re using it for. if you have one workstation that will connect to the drive via SCSI or Fibre, both SDLT and LTO will work great and i would go with LTO since it has higher storage capacities. also the SCSI version of the 600 drive is much cheaper than the Ethernet 600A and can sustain much faster read/write speeds. but, the SCSI 600 doesnt have the MXF aware system and can only be locally attached and not available to multiple computers through the web browser-based FTP. i also want to say that it only works with Windows, but i can’t say that for sure. we’re all Mac over here. if you have a SAN based system, dedicating one workstation to a SCSI SDLT or LTO drive could work great. if you have multiple independent edit systems, the ethernet-based 600A will be a better option.
we have only been using this system for 5 months, but it has been completely error-free and we have brought many projects fully back online with no lost media. i just brought a feature film back online because we have to bleep out some cussing for TV broadcast, but the process was fool-proof. i couldnt imagine bringing that project back from DVD-R or Blu-Ray media. although things may change in the next few years, i like the fact that these tapes have a shelf-life of 30 years. i havent heard what the official shelf life of Blu-Ray media is. and of course hard drives are the fastest way to bring stuff back online, but i’ve talked to some photographers who recycle their hard drives every 2 years because of fear of failed drives. that gets very expensive over time, even with falling prices.
hope that helps. also, call Quantum and get some advice. they wont try to sell you something (they leave that to their resellers) and they will give you good honest advice about different tape systems and what will work best for you. you have to bend your mind a bit to get away from TC-based video tape for archive. P2 users have done that for the most part by switching to a tapeless recording system, and are the most accepting of this SDLT workflow.
one last thing i should add. we have also added the SDLT600A to our office computer backup system. so we are using the deck for both video project archiving and our regular office computer backup system. 2 birds with one stone.
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No. i contacted Quantum with the same question and they explained it like this: video files are typically already partially compressed (except for Uncompressed codecs), so you would never get 600GB capacity because the 600A’s internal hardware compression wouldnt be able to compress the file much more than Quicktime has already. the 2:1 compression that tape drives typically employ is based on storing pure data files like Word and Excel Docs or things like that. since compression is part of most video codecs, the internal compression in the 600A would just slow things way down and not necessarily help with file sizes. i leave it off, which is what Quantum recommends for video.
since the deck and tape are OS agnostic, it acts in a weird way with files that have no extension. like .mov Quicktime files that have “hide extension” checked in the Get Info field. any video file that Final Cut captures from a video tape is this way. if you move a quicktime file with no extension to SDLT, then move it back to you local hard drive, Mac OS wont recognize the file as a video file and Final Cut wont reconnect to it. if you “un-hide” the extension before you move it to SDLT, then move it to SDLT and move it back, Final Cut wont reconnect to it because the file didnt have an extension in the edit, so to Final Cut its a different file. i have no experience with Windows with this deck, but i imagine it would be similar.
my point with the last story: our solution to storing quicktime files without extensions is to put them into a new folder and zip it. this folder is typically our Media Manager folder with all Media from the project. this conserves all the video files’ properties and it also compresses the files better than the 600A’s internal compressor. DV files compress quite a bit (4:1 or better) and DVCPRO HD is about 1.5:1. most graphics files wont compress at all. it is an additional time consuming step depending on how much you need to zip and how fast your computer is, but it also protects the integrity of the data and saves space. with MXF files from P2, you dont need to take this step, and you shouldnt since the 600A can read MXF metadata. depending on your workflow, this whole file extension thing may be a non-issue.
so for our 70min feature film, the Media Manager folder was a 90GB compressed zip file (probably 200GB+ uncompressed). if i needed one small file from that zip, i would move the zip off the deck (takes about an hour or so), then open the zip directory (not the whole file) with Zipeg. then i select the one file i need and Zipeg extracts that one file instead of unarchiving the entire zip file. typically we try to keep our zip files under 30GB so we dont have to constantly move huge zips for one small file. it sounds complicated, but we havent had a problem thus far. even if Quantum made a fix for this, i probably would still zip files because it saves so much space over hardware compression.
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we use Compressor to upres 720p to 1080i. i havent had a chance to try the Kona 3 yet, but i am definitely curious. the Compressor flow works great, albeit time consuming. the only caveat is that any noise or over exposure in the 720p shot will look more pronounced in the 1080i conversion. it has been my experience that 1080i (or 1080p24) originated footage definitely looks better than 720p. 720p is generally softer than 1080i, but if there is a lot of movement in the frame, its not really noticeable. since we overcrank our shots more than half the time, 720p is the main codec we use. we also mix our overcranked footage with 16mm film, so the slight softness vs. 1080i is preferred. since 720p takes up less P2 space and upconverts acceptably, we shoot it most of the time. we pretty much only use 1080i (or 1080p24) for scenics and interviews, where static sharpness is desired.
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btw, we shoot action sports documentaries (Snowboard, surf, motocross), thus the mixing of formats and frame rates.
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i’ve had one of these units for a few months now and i can’t sing its praises loud enough. i havent really explored its MXF-aware capabilities yet, however. i bought it needing a way to clear off our Xsan and archive 1.5 years of projects ranging from feature films to episodic TV to podcasts and web. i needed about 4TB of archive space in-house and would also need a second copy to be stored out of house. and i didnt want to deal with hard drives as i have been burned in the past on failed hard drives. granted its a bit slow – it averages about 30MB/s on our GigE network, but it has allowed us to archive many projects, and in the case of a few, bring them back online into FCP with all media reconnected in about 3 hours for a 70min feature film. imagine doing that from DVD-R media.
we use a program called AutoCat that will catalog the contents of the tape, then we copy this catalog (which is just OS X aliases and folders, just like Finder. you dont need another program to read the catalog) over to our server. this allows us to do a Spotlight search for a clip, then Spotlight tells us what tape its on, then we grab the tape and transfer the clip via the 600a’s web-based FTP to any ANY computer in the office.
another thing thats much different than the old DLT workflow is that this drive is very fast. the directory is available in about 15 seconds, and it can find a file anywhere on the tape in less than 2 minutes at the most.
at the level that we work at, we are used to $65k for an HDCAM deck using $55 60min tapes. many of our competitors just copy their P2 footage to HDCAM because that is what they are used to. they know they have a tape. many broadcasters do that with their HDV footage too. they can’t really imagine a tapeless world and in most cases need a 1080i copy on hand that will work with an HD-SDI system. HDCAM is convenient. my bosses are a bit like this too. a 300GB SDLT tape is $78 and can hold 30min of Uncompressed 10-bit HD, 5 hours of DVCPRO HD 1080i60, or 14 hours of 720p24 footage. thats a big savings over Varicam, HDCAM or HDCAM SR tape.
when we mastered our last feature, it fit on 2 SDLT tapes as both a media managed project and a final Quicktime that we used for printing to HDCAM. this also included every alternate version of the movie with all the different graphics and soundtracks. because we used this method, we only had to print a third as many HDCAM tapes for our library and our distributors. this has saved us quite a bit of money.
some people say the deck is too expensive and hard drives are cheap (and getting cheaper). but when your alternatives are a 1400 Varicam deck for $25k, $65k for an HDCAM deck, or hard drives that have a reliable shelf life of only 5 years, a $5k SDLT deck really starts to look like a steal. and like a previous post, when Apple adds native MXF support to FCP, this system will become even more valuable. you can really think of it as a data VCR. for my workflow, it has been a huge time, money and space saver.
theres very few people who have used one of these decks, so please feel free to ask me any questions. i took a risk when i bought this thing because there wasnt much experience out there to draw on, but i’m so glad that i did.
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we also have a custom naming scheme carried over from our tape logging days. ie, LFhdvTordrillos13-10, which is:
LF – movie “Lost and Found”
hdv – shot on HDV
Tordrillos – the trip to the Tordrillos mtn range in AK
13 – tape number 13
10 – shot number tenwe shoot docu-style so theres no takes or scenes in the name.
this allows us to put all the tapes in chronological order, even though every tape’s TC starts at zero. to modify this for P2 use, we changed it to: LFp2Tordrillos001-10, so now its P2 card number 1, shot 10. before we replace the MXF name with this name in the log, we copy the MXF name into the “Shot/Take” field in the “Import Panasonic P2” window, so the original name never gets lost. we also rename the card folder 001 to LFp2Tordrillos001, but leave the MXF files in the CONTENTS folders with their original name. if and when we need to reconnect, we have all the info we need.
bit long of an explanation, but i hope that helps. btw, we use the Quantum SDLT600A for archive and i can’t recommend this highly enough. some people get scared off by the $5k price tag for the deck, but when you compare it to $65k for an HDCAM deck or $15k for a Varicam deck, its looks pretty damn cheap. i can fit 7 hours of 720p24 on a $78 SDLT tape. thats a savings of $286 vs 7 hours of HDCAM. yes Hard Drives are cheap, but i have had so many go down over the years that i just can’t trust them, even if i have 3 copies. just too fragile with limited shelf life.
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720/24p is an HD format. like posted previously, you can only record DV onto tape. so if you want to do 24p, you are limited to 480/24p or 480/24pA. 480 is the highest resolution that you can record to tape. in this regard, the HVX200 would be very similar to your VX2100.
you could get 1080p24 using an external firewire drive, but it will record at 1080i60 and use a pulldown method to make it “look” like 24p. then FCP can remove the extra frames if you want to edit at 24p. or it can leave them in if you edit at 1080i60, which is what my company does.
having shot in the mountains for a few years, i can say that you would be better off using the P2 cards rather than a firewire drive. the firewire connection is loose at best and the Firestore is a fragile device. i would recommend a P2 Store with 3 P2 cards, then offload the P2 Store at the end of the day onto a laptop. this is what my action sports production company does, but it may be too much equipment and too pricey for you guys.
if you think that tape is the only way, i would suggest either keeping the VX2100, or look at the new 24p HDV cameras from Sony. i can’t recommend the HVX200 highly enough, but it might not make the most sense for you guys at this moment.
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it sounds like you might have a bad P2 Store. but before we decide that, try a few things.
have you copied footage onto the P2 Store that you need? or have you not used it for a critical shoot yet?
if theres nothing critical on it, try formatting the P2 Store again. use a paper clip to hold down the HDD Format button (i’ve found that most pens dont reach deep enough). when the lights blink (within 2 seconds), press the start button. when the HDD Format light goes out, its formatted. this process only takes a second or so. P2 card reformats are almost instantaneous.
when you plug a freshly formatted P2 Store into you G5, nothing will happen because there wont be a drive to mount.
shoot some footage on multiple P2 cards, even if its just 30 seconds per card, and try to transfer them all over to the P2 Store. so like 4 cards. then plug the P2 Store into your G5 and you should see 4 drives labeled NO NAME appear on your desktop.
if at some point during this process something doesnt work, post here. then we can determine if its a bad P2 Store, bad drivers on the Mac, or something else.
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