[Jim Newman]

I can’t really speak to the image comparison because I don’t think looking at Vimeo and Youtube is a great way to compare images and I’ve never been on a side by side comparison shoot.

I did look at both cameras over a year ago and decided to buy the Scarlet over the C300 for a few reasons, mostly for what has already been mentioned in previous posts.

4K RAW, which I think to clients is actually more of a marketing buzzword but to us, it gives us latitude to create better images. There are plenty of times where I’ve been rushed on set and where I’ve turned a calamity into a happy accident because I had a RAW image to work with in post. A lot of that has to do with my inexperience as a DP but still I was saved because of RAW.

The ability to change mounts; although I don’t own the PL mount I do own the EF and F mount. I generally only use one on a shoot but it gives me the option of using my Canon L series zooms that I previously owned and my Zeiss Duclos Cinemoded F mount primes.

And lastly, the user forum which includes the Red execs. I feel Reduser.net parallels the same community as Creative Cow. I haven’t really experienced that with too many other forums. Add in the head guys at Red actually answer posts and listen to what the user base has to say and it’s really invaluable. There are countless times where we’ve asked for something to come in a firmware update and a few months later it arrives. I don’t really know that you’ll find that with other major camera manufacturers.

Of course there’s the bad, I’ve had to do fresh re-boots to the camera often. A lot of time the LCD will just freeze on me and I need to take the time to power down and power back up etc. I’m guessing Canon has all that stuff worked out because they’ve been in the game a lot longer.

[Jim Newman]

Bob and Chris thanks for replying,

I did use our cutting tower as the server. Only because it was the only thing available to me and this is really just a trial and error phase considering I can always return the switch and the cable I’m sure we can use for another application. I should have mentioned in my initial post that I ran my tests in 1920×1080.

We do our offline in PR Proxy and online to 4:4:4. I’m figuring that after we buy our second tower I’ll turn our current tower into a dedicated server but I’ll still online locally to the main cutting tower avoiding a bandwidth issue. Like most people we have several external drives that are redundant to our master footage.

I agree that the system hasn’t been tested to it’s max capacity. I would like run different scenarios over the next week or so seeing how far I can push the system. Economically, if I can’t get this thing working properly, it will make more sense for me to schedule a day and night editor working on the same system rather than have two day editors that can’t access the information they need.

And of course, as Chris mentioned, the last thing I would want to have happen is miss a deadline because everything died on us at a crucial point.

Since I have pretty much zero IT knowledge, where can I find the mbps I’m transferring? That may also be useful in this forum as well.

What do you guys think would basically be the ultimate test for this system? Should I try PR 422HQ? Should I keep adding more edit stations?(might be difficult) any thoughts?

Bob, I know you’re in Orlando, but if you were local to LA I would invite you to our facility to take a look.

Thanks,

[Jim Newman]

I’d be careful with the mini. We have one here in the office and we also have a Kona 3 for our I/O card. We ran tests on both the up convert and the down convert and pretty much across the board it’s been a hung jury.

Half the office feels the picture quality is sharper through the mini and half feel it’s the same. This is going to sound extremely inefficient to most, but we actually end up injesting through both pieces of hardware and outputting with both on a layoff. We then sit there staring and arguing. We’ve found that opinion changes per a project basis.

I do have to admit we’ve never done an up convert with mini-dv, usually DVCPRO.

Most the time the mini sits in a box in the closet and has become a bit of a joke when deciding if we should try to lose it on craigslist.

We use a JVC DT- V24L 1D if anyone is curious.

[Jim Newman]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for responding to the post.

Let me start off by saying that I know you are a proponent of the AJA products and specifically the Kona3. My company is as well that’s why we outfitted our bay with their products.

That being said we had tried doing the downconvert through the Kona3 card but felt the image quality looked rather soft. We contacted the station we’re delivering to and they told us that they use a Teranex for their injest and output. So we looked into and and decided to go with the mini based on price. Unfortunately we’re just not big enough to purchase the more expensive model.

Since we usually use an LCD for critical color we rented a SONY CRT thinking that the LCD was causing the SD image to be soft. But the image still seemed soft on the CRT.

Tomorrow we’re laying off again and I will post our findings.

Thanks for responding I know your time is valuable.

Jim

[Jim Newman]

Dino,

Thanks for the advice. Previously we had tried to move the sequence forward to compensate for the four frames. At first it was working then about minute 3 it was suddenly off by one frame. We had set the deck to non drop frame.

Although, I was just looking through the Kona 3 control panel I did notice there is an “OUTPUT TC OFFSET” we’re going to try and adjust that next.

Thanks for your time.