Jeremiah Black
Forum Replies Created
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1) the DSR 80/85 deck is huge. HUGE! I’ve carried them up and down many flights of stairs, and it’s not pleasant. The tape mechanism required top speed up a mini dv tape reliably is enormous and heavy.
2) only a 25 mb/sec signal is being written to mini dv tape. Forget what QDSI can move. I don’t know about the chemicals and tape stock on DvCam, but DVCPRO tape is different. It can be sped up to have DVCPRO50 or DVCPRO HD recorded on it. This is why the SDX-900 and varicam take DVCPRO tapes, and not mini dv tapes.
3) mini dv tape can’t be sped up 4 times to record HD. That’s why the varicam takes DVCPRO tapes. DVCPRO tapes can be sped up because they’re heavier and thicker tape and have different chemicals. But that tape won’t fit in a small casette enclosure.
4) tape heads to record HD are expensive. Wildly expensive. They cost more to buy than than the P2 even sells for.
These are the main reasons why the HVX will shoot to P2 and not speed up DVCPRO tape. And why no one will probably make a camera that tries to speed up tape 4 times to get an HD signal. as you’re suggesting, there might be a way to work it out, so that it’s possible, but no one is going to do it, as it’s not a camera that would be (1) small (2) cheap (3) light (4) profitable.
you wrote: “Are you using QSDI with two of those decks or Sony’s editstation?”
Neither, right now. I loaned the deck to friend of mine, and sold my QSDI board a few months back. You can buy it, if you want. It weighs about a million pounds.
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card -
If you want a cheap camera that can shoot non-mpeg2 compressed HD and can do varible speed- then you gotta go to P2 or hard drives.
If you want to wait until P2 price drops or until the design and workflow is finally perfected, that’s cool, but someone’s gotta at least make the first move. And that’s what Panasonic is doing.
Also, what do you care? If it doesn’t work for you either (1) don’t buy it or (2) make your own camera. But, the camera will work nicely for some people. Take a deep breath and get a grip.
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card -
I’m talking about what being written to tape, you’re talking about decks and QSDI connections. A deck, by the way, which I will remind you again THAT I OWN.
Please, stop writing and refer to everyone else’s posts to see where you’re making your mistakes.
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card -
I own this deck, and as I said earlier- it weighs about 60 pounds and is a big as a washing machine.
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card -
Nope. It’s still laying down a 25 mb/sec signal to those tapes. The QSDI might be moving 100 mb/sec, but that’s got nothing to do with to data rate that’s actually being laid down to tape.
Now, it is possible to speed up tapes and record a fatter signal, but not with mini dv tape. You can do it with dvcpro tape, but it’s thicker, has a differnt metal oxide, and won’t fit in small cassettes. Also, you need a huge, sturdy tape transport to do that- something like what the varicam has. If you want this camerta to be cheap and small, you’re going to have to accept compromises.
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card -
Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s not writing 100 mb/sec to tape in any sense. It’s just recording the same 25 mb/sec signal to dv tape faser. It’s also not passing the signal over firewire. QSDI is a compressed form of SDI signal proprietary to Sony used in their editing stations. Why do I know this? Because I own a DSR-85 complete with QSDI board- it weighs about 60 pounds and is a big as a washing machine.
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card -
Ken:
Hello,
Pretty interesting stuff. I’m not too familiar with DVCPRO 50 tapes, but I’ve spoken to Panasonic and they’re the ones who told me that running a mini dv tape at 4 times the speed reliably wasn’t possible based on the flimsiness of those little tapes. Perhaps it isn’t so much the tape, per say, but just the fact that it’s in those little cartriges. But, I’ve used the varicam, and I don’t really think it’s the same tape stock in those oversized cassette enclosures.
Anybody else wanna chime in here?
Hello,
– jeremiah black
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card -
you worte: “The camera writes 720p60 to tape, and duplicates whole frames (adding pulldown) to pad the 24p to 60p. It is NOT Varicam style where you have 60 unique frames written to tape, and you only see some of them upon playback”
The new Panasonic camera write varible speed to P2, not to tape. That’s the whole point of P2, you can easily do varible speed, because there’s no tape mechanism running at constant speed to complicate things.
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card -
toke,
You wote: “For many years there has been dvcam deck that can read/write with 100Mbps.
Although it has 14 heads, there is no limit in miniDV enclosure for not to do this.”This statement really doesn’t make any sense since dvcam is 25 mb/sec foramt.
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card -
I have a lot of Sony gear, but, on the whole, Sony is a disappointment to me as a company. Sony’s policy is simply not to go after the prosumer market aggressively, but to stick to major broadcasters and high end equipment. They don’t hang out on the forums to help. They announce products 18 months ahead of their release date. They’ve stated many times that they have no intention of offering true 24p to the masses, their innovations such as HDV are innovations only in protecting their high end market. And they insist on making their own proprietary formats for everything and do not work with other companies to create cross platform formats, (betamax, blu-ray, QSDI, the PSP, the list goes on and on). And, unlike Panasonic, they refuse to release their 1080i codec to editing systems such as FCP.
I used to be incredibly loyal to Sony for years. But the last two years I’ve begun to shift over to Panasonic, because they pay more attention to me. But don’t weep for Sony. The company is huge, they’re the big boys on the block, and they’ll stay that way for a while because they (1) primarily go after the big money, and (2) they aggressivly seek to dominate every corner they touch.
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card