[Greg Day]

Been using one for 3 weeks now and absolutely love it! Seemed a bit pricy at first, but with the built-in waveform combined with the outstanding picture quality, it’s a great deal. Mostly been working with SD footage, and the monitor does a great job of scaling and the image looks very nice. HD footage is amazing.

It’s also built extremely well – rock solid, sturdy and good design. The options are endless and the manual is gigantic.

*****

Dog Day Editing
Creative Editorial & Directing Services
Rose City

[Greg Day]

[JeremyG] “Perhaps your Kona card is trapped in the 10th dimension. Look here for more.

http://www.tenthdimension.com“

thanks. Now my brain hurts…

Dog Day Editing
Creative Editorial & Directing Services
Rose City

[Greg Day]

greg at dogdayediting dot com

thanks for the info.

Dog Day Editing
Creative Editorial & Directing Services
Rose City

[Greg Day]

I’ve been working in anamorphic. The deliverables will be a letterboxed D-beta, a full-frame D-beta, and an anamorphic DVD.

I tried scaling in FCP and it seems OK. Not great, but passable.

thanks

greg

Dog Day Editing
Creative Editorial & Directing Services
Rose City

[Greg Day]

It does need to be blown up. I’m just trying to figure out the best way – least amount of artifacts, cleanest, etc. I didn’t know if the Kona does any better job at scaling up than FCP or AE.

Since it’s a fairly significant amount of scaling up to fill the frame vertically, there is a lot of softness added. I was wondering if anyone had better success with one method vs another.

Thanks for the response!

g

Dog Day Editing
Creative Editorial & Directing Services
Rose City

[Greg Day]

I figured it would handle it. Problem is, I have over 200GB of raw material (mainly because it’s a “no-budget” film, and the deck was rented to capture everything at once with limited ability to recapture later). It was all captured on my G5 tower with no problems.

Now that the project will mainly be cut on the Powerbook, and without an external drive (it could be used, I just thought they would rather not be tethered), the only feasible way I see to do it is to squeeze the file size down.

That said, I think I finally figured out the solution. What seems to be happening is no matter what the compression setting is, it always sets the clips to the DVCProHD aspect ratio, while the sequence is square. By adjusting the aspect ratio to square on each clip, everything seems to display correctly.

Thanks for the feedback. I’m glad to hear you’ve had success with the codec on a PB. Helps me to sell another idea I have to a client!

greg

Dog Day Editing
Creative Editorial & Directing Services
Rose City

[Greg Day]

Check here:

https://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?128@144.Y2dVaoJCVaq.1@.68af4f3b

It kind of works. Just not as well as it should.

Dog Day Editing
Creative Editorial & Directing Services
Rose City

[Greg Day]

So a PCI firewire card is in our future to solve this so that we can capture straight to the LaCie drive.
I think the TC breaks are a function of not enough bandwidth on the firewire bus on the g5, as I haven’t experienced them at all going to the xserve.

I’m using the LaCie FW800 PCI card in my G5 to connect my BDE. The 1200A was running through the onboard FW400 port. I was still getting the timecode break issue, so I don’t know that the card will solve the problem.

But I do think you’re probably right about the bandwith being part of the problem since the “breaks” would usually occur on capturing longer clips (2-3 minutes or longer). I wish I would’ve taken better notes to see if there was a pattern though, since it certainly wasn’t all long clips that had the problem. Again, hoping that they’re not actual TC breaks!

g

Dog Day Editing
Creative Editorial & Directing Services
Rose City

[Greg Day]

thanks for that.

here’s to hoping…

Dog Day Editing
Creative Editorial & Directing Services
Rose City

[Greg Day]

During captures there is a bug in the deck where FCP will see phantom “timecode breaks” whether you’re capturing via Firewire or using RS-422 control, especially if you do large Batch Captures.

I just spent the entire weekend with a rental 1200A capturing 14 hours of footage. I came across the “timecode break” errors fairly regularly – doing batch capture for each tape as they were logged would usually turn up two or three. There were a few instances where it actually created new clips which I presume means there were “real” breaks. Otherwise, I could not see any actual breaks in the clips.

Have you found any issues with these errors, i.e. are they real timecode breaks, or is it something buggy?? I’m mildly concerned that it could come back to haunt me later if the film was ever to be reconformed. Right now, the plan is to master from the native DVCPro HD files, so even if there were breaks, it shouldn’t matter, right??

BTW, simply using a single LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500GB on a dual 2.5, running FCP 4.5, OSX.4.

Also BTW, this codec is pretty darn cool – looks great, less filling!

greg

Dog Day Editing
Creative Editorial & Directing Services
Rose City