[Gary Adcock]

[mike] “Sure, the apple one can handle video over 100IRE, but why doesn’t if truly function with color. Is there a filter out there that will make safe WHITE’S over 100IRE and colors OUTSIDE the color safe circle? Not really desaturate either….clip color outside not lower all.”

sure is!
it is called a proc amp and the hardware version has been the standard since the advent of television.
the software version in FCP does the same thing

gary adcock

Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Gary Adcock]

[Paul Mogg] “Gary could you please explain in detail why you think this is true as my experience so far has led me to believe that quite the opposite is true. I’ve done many renders of multi-layered composites on the FCP timeline in 10 bit uncompressed and the improved quality is dramatic and quite obvious to the naked eye compared to a DVCPRO HD render of the same timeline, (though I’ve not yet compared the difference in FCP 5.0 which has very much improved the native DVCPRO HD rendering quality).”

First off Sorry — for the delay I was on vacation last week.

simply your video quality is not going to be improved by just rendering your compressed footage in an UC timeline, now everything that you “need to render” will look better but not the source footage and additionally you have added another layer of software vs. hardware decompression on your content. I have yet to find software the handles the 960 -1280 frame scaling / sizing any better than panasonic and aja do in hardware on their respective products. This is especially noticeable with any graphics or animations that move or blur horizontally across the screen. I can also tell you that many networks are now bouncing footage handled in this manner for delivery as it can causes issues that be very noticeable when recommpressing footage sent up to the satellites.

gary adcock

Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Gary Adcock]

[Gabe Hatfield] “With 23.97 DVCPROHD Varicam settings on the FCP easy setups, any clip (shot at 48fps) that I captured converted diretly to slow-motion without running the plug-in. Is this just a Final Cut anomaly?”

thats because by using the varicam setting you told the capture process to seek out the dynamic frame rate- so it did what you told it to do. The K2 recorded the data as you asked it too. What you did was actually turn your FCP station into a hardware Frame Rate converter.

Next time just use the 720p23.98 easy set up to only get the footage at 23.98 so you can convert it later.

gary adcock

gary adcock

Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Gary Adcock]

[Jim Blokland] “Seems since I installed the Kona 2, on startup after the OSX splash screen, my startup apps begin to load, and while this continues — both monitors go blue for about 7-8 seconds “

I only see this when the user has a custom desktop image – not one of the stock apple backgrounds.
it usually means the file is not a tif or pdf and it has to convert it.

gary adcock

Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Gary Adcock]

First off I am not a fan of the off-lining in SD any longer. The compressed codec for HD have made the down conversion process a no-brainier. Using DVCPROHD compressed 1080 files make for a terrific offline and you are still looking at a progressive image not the interlace of SD content. it also means that you will not have to build graphics twice. files compressed in this manner require drives to only playback at about 15mgs a second – easily handled by sata or FW800 arrays.

Second 24p HDCam is not 29.97 or 60i . Sony uses what are called progressive segmented frames – PSF – the camera captures the video as 2 separate fields/ frames then recombines them back into a single (sort of) frame. This also means that it will need to record / playback 48 progressive segmented frames / fields when playing out to a monitor.

Lastly – hire someone– one cannot honestly think that they will be able to handle all of the pitfalls in in HD /24p project if you have never done either, the Data, hardware, output, etc are fairly complicated for the uninitiated, Contrary to what apple has told people working in HD in not Plug and Play

AND did I mention that it requires 3rd party hardware to work with 1080 24psf files in FCP? It is not a native ( default) format in FCP and is currently handled only by PCI products such as the AJA’s Kona2 and others.

gary adcock

Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Gary Adcock]

First off I am not a fan of the off-lining in SD any longer. The compressed codec for HD have made the down conversion process a no-brainier. Using DVCPROHD compressed 1080 files make for a terrific offline and you are still looking at a progressive image not the interlace of SD content. it also means that you will not have to build graphics twice. files compressed in this manner require drives to only playback at about 15mgs a second – easily handled by sata or FW800 arrays.

Second 24p HDCam is not 29.97 or 60i . Sony uses what are called progressive segmented frames – PSF – the camera captures the video as 2 separate fields/ frames then recombines them back into a single (sort of) frame. This also means that it will need to record / playback 48 progressive segmented frames / fields when playing out to a monitor.

Lastly – hire someone– one cannot honestly think that they will be able to handle all of the pitfalls in in HD /24p project if you have never done either, the Data, hardware, output, etc are fairly complicated for the uninitiated, Contrary to what apple has told people working in HD in not Plug and Play

AND did I mention that it requires 3rd party hardware to work with 1080 24psf files in FCP? It is not a native ( default) format in FCP and is currently handled only by PCI products such as the AJA’s Kona2 and others.

gary adcock

Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Gary Adcock]

[walter biscardi] “I picked up a couple of ADC to DVI adapters for about $80 each and they work very well.”

Ouch
the apple store sells a belkin model for ADC- DVI-D (no VGA) that was $29.95 I carry 3 on the road just in case.

gary adcock

Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Gary Adcock]

[Leo Ticheli] “Here’s the problem: the 1200 is without the benefit of flying erase heads to clean out the old recorded data, this leads to very high error rates at the

[Gary Adcock]

[Otis F] ” I am also in Pal country (England), and was planning on editing a piece shot on a Varicam at various frame rates. Most of the footage has been shot at 25p, but there are some 50 and 60p stuff as well. I planned on going down the firewire/native codec route but now I discover that this isn’t possible at 25p- it seems that this format isn’t ready yet for a Pal workflow using FCP”

it is not an FCP thing but related more to the adoption rate of HD in PAL countries. The Varicam was based on 24 frame film settings not a video standard. That said the Varicam was released in the US nearly 4 years ago, and are only becoming popular in the EU in the last 2. Blame the the ( less than) almighty Dollar ( insert yen | euro| pound in the appropriate currency for your country)

IF you think this is bad– understand also that what we do in FCP with Variable frame rates can not be done at all an Avid without the $27K hardware frame rate converter as the Avid Software only see 24p and 30p content from the Varicam.

gary adcock

Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Gary Adcock]

[Rick Sebeck] “1) Shoot in 23.98 (using seperate tapes for variable frame rates)

good plan – or just slate all of the VFR content with 15 sec slates so you do not get capture errors

2) Rent a 1200a deck and digitize all the footage via firewire (capturing takes separately and not full tapes at a time) using the DVCPRO HD codec

you really really need to PROPERLY Log and Capture separate clips if you plan on re-digitizing material or handing the content of to anything else.

3) Offline edit in 24fps DVCPRO HD sequence.
—Here’s where you loose me—
4) Lay to tape, then redigitize? at _____? or 4) create an uncompressed timeline and re-render

you gain nothing from rendering in an FCP timeline other that what you capture at. It can take 3-5 times as long to render a sequence in 10 bit with effect than it would to lay it back to tape and regdig it.

5) The film is ending on DVD and the budget is cheap, but should I still make a master of the “true” HD? Would I rent a D5 deck, and use the Kona to output the new render?”

use Static graphics and stay in DVCProHD since you are going down to SD for the delivery. you gain nothing but costs going to D5 for the workflow you state.

gary adcock

Studio37
HD and Film Consultation