[John Davidson]

I have an AJA IO with a Kona 2/FCP Studio setup. The Kona 2 runs component out to the monitor VGA-in and so far, so good. DVCProHD footage looks flawless and the monitor knows to autoselect whatever signal is being sent in. 480i footage looks really great too.

The monitor has an HDMI input that can handle DVI, but no direct DVI input (I guess there’s an adapter?). Obviously, I’d prefer an HDMI or DVI connect from the IO, but the component looks good enough.

HDV footage is 99% good, but there is a weird thing where I get some dancing colored pixels in darker areas of some shots. It’s a little weird to figure out, but I don’t seem to have them as much when I use the VGA HD input.

All in all, I like this monitor alot. I almost bought a 37in westinghouse a few months back with no HD Tuner, but this one has it built in. I dunno if it is just because I’m close to the warehouse, but Costco says it’ll take 15 days to deliver, but I got it in 3.

All in all, it’s a great HD monitor and you cannot beat the price.

Cheers!
j

[John Davidson]

It’s not an official broadcast monitor, but if you’re looking for size and full resolution 1920×1080 that can handle 1080p, this one has a great price. I’ve had it for a week now and it’s impressive. It comes in around $1700 after taxes, rebates, etc.

Anyway, it’s a 37in LCD full-res HD monitor with multiple inputs, but the brand (Sceptre) is a little no-name.

https://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?whse=&topnav=&prodid=11042448&ec=BC-EC877-CatHome&pos=13

[John Davidson]

I don’t know what camera you’re shooting with, but I only get grain when I boost the gain. I just shot a ton of Z1U footage in Oahu and spend hours playing with shutter speeds in the sun and at night/dusk. As long as my gain was set on zero, there was no grain – day or night. The lower the shutter speed, the greater amount of motion blur you have. With the shutter speed set to 4, the video was much brighter, obviously because the frame of video received 1/4 second to process the light.

At any rate, it’s possible that his question relates in some way to Final Cut Pro since we’re in that forum, in which case, it could he’s referring to the “marching ants” one sees when one presses control-z. Because you shot this in low light, it’s very likely you did crank the gain up considerably, thereby making normally lit elements very bright. If that is the case, when you hit control-z, you’ll see lines around objects and it will freak you out.

Hit control-z again and you’ll shut the zebra line feature off.

Neo

[John Davidson]

Some places do, some places don’t. I just got billed $200hr for DVCProHD + operator. All they did was digitize the footage for me and dump the clips from the capture folder to a hard drive I supplied.

Otherwise they charge 100/hr plus editor. It’s ironic to me because DVCProHD uncompressed is half the file size of SD Digibeta. I think the deck is even cheaper, too.

If you’re doing full on REAL HD with massive file sizes and the like, go for it. Especially if you have that expensive new deck I can’t remember the name of….

Eventually I’d say that most clients will figure out that in some instances HD is cheaper to do and easier on edit systems (like DVCProHD). Prior to a month ago, I didn’t know that there was a difference between DVCProHD and FULL HD. I now think DVCProHD is awesome.

j

[John Davidson]

Sweet. AJA says the Kona 2 Driver is CAC, so it looks like I’m set!
Thanks guys!
j

[John Davidson]

Ya know, I didn’t bring it up initially because I think I was afraid people would say “hey, your 30k digibeta deck is broken!”. It’s good to know I wasn’t alone in this.

The input ref switch did the trick. Last layback was flawless. Thanks guys!
j

[John Davidson]

I think I fixed the problem. I had to change the “Ref Video” switch to “Input Video” rather thant REF on the deck.

Does that make sense to anybody? Wouldn’t it be great if all problems could be solved with the flip of a switch?

j

[John Davidson]

I’ll give a second heck yeah to Atmospheres library. Extreme Music’s directors cut is also a winner. I also have a soft spot in my ear for Video Helper. The Video Helper Noise Generator library is amazing for sound effects, too.

[John Davidson]

Have you notice any crashing issues when you do this? It may be that the clip I was playing back was encoded at H.264, but I’m getting a nasty crash each time I enable audio playback during Fast Forwards..

[John Davidson]

You don’t specify whether you’re saving for long form or short form content. I do it for commercials, so this is my workflow.

Because some folks at home don’t have the latest version of QT, and because some are even on computers with the monitor resolution set too low (800×600), I build my settings like this.

Video: QT Sorenson 3, MEDIUM quality, 400×300, enable fast start,
Audio, ulaw 2:1, 44khz Stereo

These settings will create about a 9 meg clip per 30 seconds.

I then upload that file to a server, have a simple template web page on a PC, go into a website design APP (I use FrontPage because it’s easy and it’s WYSIWYG – but only works on PC), click on the plugin in the design page, relink to the new file uploading on my mac, rename the page, save, and it’s done.

I’m sure other folks have better workflows. Some people tend to send out an FTP link to a web folder, I prefer to build a webpage so you can view it before it’s finished downloading.

in a few moths h264 will change this anyways…. It just takes a while for everybody to get it…..