[Jeremy Garchow]

Well, but of course. It’s good for the broadcast gigs, but not so good for the non broadcast gigs.

Still, that is years to come until that is a true and reliable reality.

Technology moves quite fast. Old habits and expensive gear die hard.

———–
AJA Kona2>HD10C2>D10A

Decklink Extreme

[Jeremy Garchow]

Fantastic.

Thanks P.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Noah, please point me in the direction where you can rent a 1200A for $300. I can’t find it for less than $650 or $700.

Also, a big (and quite possibly misunderstood) caveat of the 1200A, is that there is no deck control through the RS-422, which means you can lay the whole thing off through firewire and have extremely limited deck control that is not frame accurate, you can try and lay off HD-SDI and have firewire as deck control, or you can crash record. Whichever way is chosen, it’s far from ideal when you have to make timecode accurate masters. Looks like you will have to rent a D5 (for true 24p), a 1700 (720p24 over 60), or the HD CAM which does true 24p@1080. All of those decks are very expensive to rent, let alone buy.

We might need decks to edit with P2, but we are sure going to need something to master to. I work on a lot of live shows where tape is still very much in existence, be it HD or SD. I am preparing for a show in June with a 12 x 25 foot screen all running HD. It’s not like I am going to hand over a wad of P2 cards and tell the tape ops (or media ops in this case) to have at it. That situation might be a reality in the future, but I would expect not in the coming months or even years. My local renter said he won’t even be taking delivery of the 200s until December.

Maybe the long standing tradition will be reversed now. Instead of paying a bunch of dough for a camera and paying less (albeit still a “bunch”) for a deck, maybe Panasonic wants to have us pay less for the camera, and throw all of our assets in a D5 deck. I would imagine this would alienate just about everyone in this forum. I know I couldn’t swing a D5 rental on every edit, we are just too small. I need that money to “pay rent”, know what I mean?

It’ll be nice when this speculation is over. Who knows what Panasonic has planned. Whatever it is, I’m sure they have given it at least a little thought, or perhaps they haven’t. Maybe they want to release this camera in conjunction with P2, and sort out all the deficiencies/shortcomings later. Maybe we are all the guinea pigs they are looking for. I’ve only been in the ‘biz’ for 8 or so years, and I sure haven’t seen anyone as excited about a piece of new technology, ever. Maybe (just maybe) Panasonic has something sorted that we haven’t even thought of yet.

It’ll be fun to watch all of this story unravel as long as we can all afford to buy the tickets to the theatre.

Peace, love, and happiness.

JeremyG

———–
AJA Kona2>HD10C2>D10A

Decklink Extreme

[Jeremy Garchow]

I don’t know how important this is to you, but I know that BM cards do not have 24p down conversion, at least they didn’t when I worked with them. There are of course many ways around this (including using a deck), but it’s nice to be able to run the down conversion through the card as well as monitor HDSDI simultaneously through the card, especially if you don’t have a deck on hand all the time. We still make many SD (BetaSP) masters (but are posting more and more in HD) so this feature is key for me and the small shop i work for. As a former BM user, I am sooo happy I switched to AJA and Kona 2 for DVCPRO HD. It works much better than the BM cards in my experience.

On the upside of BM, there is more real time functionality with uncompressed HD and they also have the temporary solution of the RGB to YUV rendering problem from AE figured out, provided you use the BM codecs. I am hoping the release of quicktime 7 will address some of these issues.

The control panel for the Kona 2 is also a great feature as it gives you a visual map of the signal routing of the multiple digital ins & digital/analog outs. Very handy.

I have also switched our SD system to the io, which is another great product that I have had zero issues to report.

Happy cutting.

Jeremy

———–
AJA Kona2>HD10C2>D10A

Decklink Extreme

[Jeremy Garchow]

Unfortunately, Qrez is “enabled in hardware, but not in software”. You should consider digitizing to DVCPRO HD, giving you good image quality combined with manageable bandwidth. The K2 is a great card for DVCPRO HD material.

I have no idea of what’s going on with Qrez, maybe someone else on this forum can enlighten us.

Jeremy

———–
AJA Kona2>HD10C2>D10A

Decklink Extreme