Ernie Santella
Forum Replies Created
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This one’s easy. The Varicam (F or H) doesn’t have a Firewire out at all. You can though, get HD-SDI out to feed to an external recorder or computer for capture.
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Hey, Don’t forget the TV Logic line. They are excellent. They do real interlaced SD as well as HD. You might find a demo or B-Stock well under $3K. I got my 23″ for about $2,200.
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Here’s a few suggestions.
I’m old school and have used good old O’Connor 50D heads/Gitzo carbon fiber stix for years. Sure, they don’t tilt 90Ëš or have lighted bubbles, but they are rock solid, smooth as glass, built tough. I can even run a prompter on top of them with my HDX900. I highly recommend them and everybody thanks me when they get one. You can usually find them used on Ebay for $250-$750.
I tried a Manfrotto/Bogen 526 as a trial (A buddy is a rep for Bogen and let me test it for a while). Horrible. I could never get the head to be smooth, it just had a sticking issue starting and stopping. I chatted with the engineers, no dice. IMHO, they are just not ready for prime-time.
I did come across another nice head/system, the Libec H60. Very nice. Smooth, solid, lightweight and well worth the $$$$ compared to Sachtler, Vinton or some of the other heads.
https://www.libecsales.com/products/ls/h60.html
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A helpful hit with Smoothcam is to only apply to the edited shot and not the entire digitized clip. It will save you a ton of time by exporting/re-importing just the shot used. Otherwise, Smoothcam tries to apply it’s magic to the entire digitized clip, which could be very long.
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The problem I notice is when the local stations switch from Network Dolby Digital encoded programming/spots to local insertion, that’s where it just cranks. I have to grab the remote at all the breaks. Not sure how to fix that.
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Sorry, if I mis-read your question. OK, to go from an HD timeline to SD videotape (which format are you trying to layoff to – BetaSP?) you will need an I/O interface.
One of the more poplular I/O’s are the AJA units. They have I/O’s for every budget and format, HD in/out or less expensive Analog I/O etc which connects either to your computers Firewire port or is a dedicated PCI Express card. These have either HD connections and/or Component video, analog audio and RS422 ports for machine control. You can use that to layoff to SD tape.
https://www.aja.com/products/io/io-hd.php
There are other companies that make these interface I/O’s, but many of us swear by AJA products and their unparalleled customer service. I have both the IoLA and Kona 3
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You can output from your FCP HD timeline to Compressor (Export a by reference movie) Just use one of the presets in Compressor for SD DVDs. There are a few things to adjust for maximum video quality/audio and frame size 4:3 or 16:9. But, it’s pretty simple process.
Check out this link for some good info.
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/compressor2_custom_presets.html
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If you look in your Utilities folder in Apps, you can load the old QT7 if you want that. They’ve included it.
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I think the biggest problem is your working on a huge project on an iMac, if it’s not fast enough, that could be the trouble.
It sounds like you have already broken the entire project into smaller sequences. But, if you are still having slow renders, it’s got to be processing power that’s killing you.
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You could color correct the three 1st before editing, then apply the color correction of each camera to all clips in that cameras bin. A little more work, but it would look better to the client.