[George Feucht]

Thomas:

You the man! Thank you so much. Works like a charm.

[George Feucht]

Sequence and clips are both 23.98.

[George Feucht]

Thanks Gary!

That clears alot up. And yes, when I said 24p I meant to say 23.98. The camera we used was a Panasonic HPX3000 (recording to P2 cards).

Things seemed alot simpler when it was just a lens, celuloid, and a lightproof sewing machine. 🙂

[George Feucht]

10 bit 1:1. I had the editor use the highest setting possible of uncompressed.

So… in theory the footage from Avid SHOULD match the footage if I just imported the AVC-Intra 100 into FCP. Theoretically. Once again, I’ll keep you posted on the test. Mostly, I’m interested in highlight recovery and pulling detail from a couple shadows without compression artifacts rearing their ugly heads.

Thanks for all your input. I was just asking of 1080psf worked as an import setting and got a wealth of other advice.

Since we are projecting big, would it be worth it to do ProRes HQ if my RAID can’t keep up with uncompressed?

[George Feucht]

I’ll see how well FPC can play the uncompressed stuff off the RAID. If the speed is there, I’ll keep it uncompressed, since the media is only eating up 1/4 of my RAID capacity.

As for film out, once again, that is best case scenario. Slim chance on that, but stranger things have happened and it would be nice to have the infrastructure set up to make that happen if needed.

As for transcoding, I’m going to run a test: The footage I have is uncompressed from Avid. Avid got the footage off the P2 cards. The only real transcode is converting them to quicktime through Media Manager. My test will be taking the original P2 files and bringing them straight into FCP/Color uncompressed. Then, I’ll find the same clip coming from the Avid conversion and put a fierce grade on each of them and see if the Avid one falls apart sooner. If they hold up the same, we’ll be in great shape. If not, we will decide if the difference is big enough to reconstruct the sequence in FCP with footage straight from the P2 cards. (Yes, well aware how much that will suck.)

I checked with Automatic Duck and they don’t have a system for re-digitizing footage (well, reconverting) from P2 cards. It would have to be manual.

Anyway, your advice has been a huge help. I’ll keep everyone posted on this process. At this point, I imported through Automatic Duck to Blackmagic’s 1080psf 23.98 10-bit 4:4:4 codec (supposedly just a quicktime reference.) I then used Media Manager to convert it to Uncompressed 10-Bit 422 1080 23.98. It is still rendering that. I’ll keep you posted on the grading test.

Once again, thank you very much!

-George Feucht

[George Feucht]

Once again, thanks for your input.

Our ultimate destination will be theatrical release. I know that the HDcam SR master will be projected at festivals and we MIGHT (in best case scenerio) go to film. Worst case scenerio, DVD and BluRay release. But it will definitely hit a couple theatrical screens at festivals.

So… does that make a case for uncompressed? If the HD-Element can keep up with speed?

Thanks!

[George Feucht]

Thanks Shane.

I’ve got a Caldigit HD Element RAID with 6 TB of memory striped to RAID 5 (so 4TB of usable memory). Would this do the job speed-wise? It is a 90 min feature and takes up 850 gigs when uncompressed.

If not, how much quality am I scrubbing off with ProRes 422 HQ?

Thank you so much for your input.

[George Feucht]

Thanks! I’ll give that a try once I find that box. (Sorry, I’m an Avid guy navigating through unfamiliar waters.)

[George Feucht]

Tricky is an understatement!

Thanks for responding. We had Avid translate the files into uncompressed MXF. I then had Automatic Duck import the files with media attached (the Avid sequence had media attached).

This import is the step I was wondering about timeline settings. I’m currently trying it with 1080psf 23.98.

Through this import, (to my understanding) the MXF files have a quicktime reference put on them to trick FCP into playing them. This, however, doesn’t trick Color from what I hear. So I am now using media manager to recompress the footage to 10-bit uncompressed 422, which I believe actually converts all the clips to quicktimes.

My big question is whether that 24psf will screw things up somewhere in there. I am also hoping the generation loss by bringing the footage across and rendering it into quicktimes will clip off some quality.

Thanks!