[Jason J rodriguez]

Hi Todd,

I will echo the sentiments of Walter . . . at NAB06 as a first-time vendor, we were working on our first digital cinema prototype camera, and because of the R&D expenses didn’t have the marketing budget to purchase a booth in a spot on the convention floor where we could get the exposure we wanted, nor present the product in the manner we wanted.

Rather than trying to foot the bill alone, we went to one of our partners and saw if we could find space in their booth, and not only show-off our new prototype digital cinema camera, but also highlight it’s integration with our partner’s software for high-end digital cinematography workflows. Furthermore, demonstrating the combination of our partners well-established software, and their support helped to “validate” our product . . . where it would have initially been seen as a “nice-experiment” if we simply had a small (but expensive) booth in the back of the central hall, telling the entire story of the system and it’s powerful integration points with our partners gave the product a real-world backing and substance that it other-wise would not have had.

Finding the right established partners who are willing to help you nuture and mature your product is one of the best decisions you can make, and the combined synergy between parnters together benefits not only both companies in the end, but customers as well. I think in today’s day and age, it’s the integration points that your product can provide, not how it excludes others (and end’s up being something “new” to buy that is proprietary and invalidates other products) that will help it sell in the end.

So definitely go for it, and I wish you the best of success!

Thanks,

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

“Large” projects in AVID are actually quite easy to manage. No problems there. Plus with AVID you have the ability to make bins you can import into other projects, so should you ever have to split up a project because it got too big, it’s very easy. You can import a specific bin from another project, so you don’t need to import everything from another project . . . you can just select the stuff you want. Of course every bin is it’s own individual file, so it’s not like Premiere where bins are inside the file, and you have no file-level access to them. Think of bin folders in your project window like the title files in older versions of Premiere . . . you made titles that were in the project window, but where actually individual files on the HDD . . . so you could import those files into another project very easily. So splitting up project files in AVID for groups to work on is very easy.

FCP gets a little sluggish depending on the machine you’re using. But there are no issues with memory errors. I’ve had 50MB project files with 45 hours of footage and thousands of subclips that function pretty flawlessly, at least in versions 4 and 5.

Thanks,

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

Audio output is only lost from the Blackmagic card itself, not the internal audio.

Testing Blackmagic capture.app is a good idea I will have to try on Monday to see if it’s the card or just Final Cut Pro.

I will get back to you after further test, probably Monday.

Thanks,

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

Sony quotes their IMX I-frame MPEG-2 50Mb/s format as “digi-beta” quality. It’s not completely digital betacam quality of course (Digibeta is 10-bit for starters, and only 2:1 compression, where-as 50Mb/s is very close to 3:1 compression), but it’ supposedly very close image-quality-wise. So 100Mb/s I-frame MPEG-2 should look very nice (about 1.5:1 compression).

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

Forget the knee controls and just use a custom gamma curve (CVPFileEditor).

That is by far the best way I’ve found to control highlight over-exposure.

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

If you want to-do a DI, especially from 2K scans, $3500 is cake.

Since you’re on AspectHD, you may want to see if there’s a facily that’s willing to-do a telecine for you to HDV stock . . . at least then you’d have something to work at in a quasi-HD resolution.

But Prospect HD/2K is a steal of deal when it comes to wanting to-do a 2K online-conform. The prices alone for a drive array to push that amount of data around in real-time are going to be far more astronomical.

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

A film scan is definitely a notch above a traditional telecine job.

Basically in a telecine, you’re passing a film image over a HD video camera. Now in the case of a something like a Spirit, it’s actually a line-scan camera, where-as others, like Cintels, are flying spot scanners, but suffice to say, they are compromising quality for the speed of transfering your film at real-time.

Film-scans on the other-hand are truely that-a scan of the entire dynamic range of the film, from d-min to d-max, and are made to make as much of a digital replica of the film-frame as possible. In this case they have sacrificed speed for the highest quality available. Also there are no true 2K telecine’s (except for the Spirit 4K I believe). The Spirit 2K basically scans the film with the line-scan camera and digitally blows it up-but the camera that scanned the film is no different than what is inside the other “normal” Spirit telecine/datacine’s.

So yes, a film-scan of your film is going to be much higher quality than a normal telecine job. A film-scan to Cineform files is also going to be a top quality product that I think you will find very attractive for doing your own DI work, especially if you know what you’re doing in digital-to-film transfers (on the back end for distribution). And of course you have the added benefit of fitting your film on a simple RAID 0, not some behemoth of a drive array system needed to sustain the 250MB/s+ that 2K 4:4:4 RGB DPX files need. The only downside to Cineform right now might be the 4:2:2 compression format (when you want to compare it to a 4:4:4 RGB file), but I think the workflow enhancements make up for any of the down-sides, and again, the Cineform codec is extremely high quality to the point where I think you’d have a very hard time telling the difference.

For a back-up/archive, what I would do is trim your project (plus any out-takes/extras you think you might want in the future), and then archive it as DPX files if you are concerned about the long-range liability of your footage.

Hope this helps,

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

Just curious, in this passage:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT=”????” /3GB

What is the programatic name of Windows XP Pro (to replace the “????”)?

Thanks,

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

Actually if you take Marco Solario’s test pattern on the codecs.onerivermedia.com site, and do his render tests with the Cineform codec (the 10-bit Prospect HD version), it could easily pass as a 10-bit 4:2:2 Uncompressed codec (i.e., like some of the ones that do a lot of filtering so they’re not really 1:1. If you go through Marco’s site, you’ll see that not all “uncompressed” codecs are created alike, and if you were to fit Cineform into the bunch, it could actually fit at the bottom of the scale of what some of these 4:2:2 uncompressed codecs are like).

After using Prospect HD, the visual quality differences between it and uncompressed 4:2:2 codecs would be like complaining about Digibeta not being a D-1.

And of course in return you gain A WHOLE LOT in workflow advantages.

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Jason J rodriguez]

[Lance Bachelder] “No need for offline/online. These are manageable size, theatrical quality .avi’s that surpass anything available in FCP or Avid.”

I’ll second that 🙂

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA