Jesse Rosen
Forum Replies Created
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I assume that you did your shoot already, but I figured I’d answer for the sake of posterity — I personally would shoot 720PN in AVCi for downconvert. There won’t be an appreciable quality difference between 1080 and 720, but the files in 720 will be half the size, which means the cards last twice as long.
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Jesse Rosen
Director of Technical Development
Abel Cine Tech, Inc.
blog.abelcine.com -
Not available yet, but (hopefully) soon, is the new S.Two OB-1
(preliminary data here: https://www.stwo-corp.com/new_page_4.htm )
Not quite as small, but still pretty cool (and I suspect a little less $$) is the KG UDR100 (also coming soon, but I’ve tested a working unit):
https://www.keisoku.co.jp/en/product/vw/recorder/udrd100/index.html
Both of these units recognize the VFR flags from the 3700. Not quite uncompressed, but pretty small is the little Codex Portable:
https://www.codexdigital.com/portable/
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Jesse Rosen
Director of Technical Development
Abel Cine Tech, Inc.
blog.abelcine.com -
I’ve actually had much better luck using Paragon NTFS on the Mac side than MacDrive on the PC side. I have a 12TB RAID hooked up to a MacPro via Fibre Channel, formatted as NTFS, and I get 300MB/S Read speed (lower write, but fast enough for my needs). Media Composer has had no problems so far working with this setup (though this is primarily a Final Cut system – Final cut has had no problems either).
Performance with MacDrive has been fairly bad – good enough for moving files around, but not good enough that I’d want to rely on it for a working drive.
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Jesse Rosen
Director of Technical Development
Abel Cine Tech, Inc.
http://www.bustedskull.com -
Just a warning about Retrospect: in the past (haven’t re-tested in the past year or so) Retrospect would not back up an empty folder. This would play havoc with some implementations of P2 workflow. I’d highly recommend BRU instead, or go for the network drives. Actually, there are some issues to be aware of with the network drives as well – there are certain characters that aren’t compatible with its internal file system. Use a real FTP client to backup, not the built-in JAVA-based one – you don’t get good error messages with it.
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Jesse Rosen
Director of Technical Development
Abel Cine Tech, Inc.
http://www.bustedskull.com -
A certain amount of softness can certainly be caused by shooting in Progressive mode – depending on the shutter you’ll get more motion blur than shooting in interlaced mode. Make sure the shutter is on and set to 180° (1/48 for 24P, 1/60 for 30P).
Then, make sure that detail is turned on, of course. The primary setting for detail is the master detail setting (DETAIL1, then LEVEL). Raise this setting till you get a look you like. Of course there are other detail settings – but without an engineer present it’s probably best to leave them at their defaults.
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Jesse Rosen
Director of Technical Development
Abel Cine Tech, Inc.
http://www.bustedskull.com -
If you can afford it, I’d get a chart from DSC labs – preferably some model of the Chroma du monde.
You get 3 main things from the Chroma du Monde.
First of all, it’s a well-made chart that will be accurate under all lighting situations. Some materials have really uneven spectral responses and so will give you quite different results depending on the spectral characteristics of the lights you are using. If you set up using one of these (non-DSC) charts – especially if you’re using a source with an odd spectral response like flos or LEDs – you may find that your camera reacts quite differently to the chart than to the actual scene you’re shooting.
Second, the colors on the CDM make a pattern on a vector scope that matches the graticules and is quite nice to set up a camera to. This is quite useful if you are matching cameras (which you can actually do reasonably well on the EX1).
Third, even if you’re not tweaking the camera much on set, having a few frames of a chart like this under each lighting setup can be really useful in post when it comes to doing color correction. It makes matching shots a breeze, and you can quickly get a sense of exactly what a particular grade is doing.
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Jesse Rosen
Director of Technical Development
Abel Cine Tech, Inc.
http://www.bustedskull.com -
Yes, you need to do something. There are actually two things you can do – one is the “proper” way, but the other is much quicker. The proper way (assuming you recorded DVCPROHD and not AVCi) is to use the frame rate converter plugin on the footage to convert it to 23.98 (or 29.97).
The faster way (because it requires no render) – plus the only way that will work with AVCi footage – is to open the clip in Cinema Tools and conform it to the frame rate you want. (You’ll have to reimport it into FCP afterwards).
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Jesse Rosen
Director of Technical Development
Abel Cine Tech, Inc.
http://www.bustedskull.com -
The 1200a will play back 720P that has 24 over 60 (or 23.98 over 59.94) as 1080/24psf, but it will not do the same for 1080i.
The newer P2 mobile (HPM110) will remove the pulldown from 1080i stream, however and output 1080Psf, so if you have access to one of those you could use it in line with the 1200 to get 1080Psf.
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Jesse Rosen
Director of Technical Development
Abel Cine Tech, Inc.
http://www.bustedskull.com -
Actually, I wasn’t recommending daisy chaining the timecode, though I suppose I wasn’t very specific. That said, I’ve never actually seen an image problem in a Varicam caused by bad timecode, even in testing with deliberately bad signals – as opposed to bad genlock which can very easily wreak havoc.
The safest thing really would be to just periodically jam-sync the cameras and let them freerun for a couple of hours (or less) at a time.
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Jesse Rosen
Director of Technical Development
Abel Cine Tech, Inc.
http://www.bustedskull.com -
Ah, the beauty of industry standards!
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Jesse Rosen
Director of Technical Development
Abel Cine Tech, Inc.
http://www.bustedskull.com