[John Pale]

[Ken Nicholson] “I’ve got a 2 hour sequence (music concert) in DVCPROHD codec that plays perfectly fine in every way. “

Not sure what the problem is, but since the sequence plays back correctly, can you just output the tape and capture that for the MPEG-2 encode?

[John Pale]

Shane, I think you are right.

This thread seems to indicate you can preserve the CC with the AJA in Uncompressed SD only.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1032514

Anyhoo…it doesnt look like this will help our original poster since he does not have one.

[John Pale]

It will always be crisper if you re-do the titles in PAL rather than convert them

Snell and Wilcox make great stuff too. Should be fine.

Interesting that you got such poor results with Compressor. I had always used Nattress until recently. I had a piece with graphics I needed to convert and was unhappy with the softness. I tried Compressor 3, and was amazed at how good it looked. Almost indistiguishable from the PAL original. Maybe going from NTSC to PAL (where the image is getting blown up a bit) its not as good.

[John Pale]

Kona 3 release notes for driver 6.03

KONA 3 / 3X Drivers Version 6.0.3, Control Panel, and Notes
(Release Date 3/9/2009, zip archive)
This release adds a new “Line 21 blanking switch” to the control panel Format tab, and a new easier-to-use KONA software and easy setup installer (easy setups are now grouped and you can decide at installation exactly which ones you want installed).

If you don’t have the Kona 3 or the Matrox, it won’t work.

[John Pale]

[Antonia Gogin] “I tried converting the final NTSC Sequence to PAL with compressor and had horrible results with both the standard conversion DV and Uncompressed presets”

Did you use the PAL preset in Advanced Format Conversions? Did you turn on the Frame Controls, setting the resize and rate conversion to Better or Best? (I have found Better works better than Best if there are graphics)

I have found Compressor 3 does really good standards conversion if you use the proper settings. Better than Nattress….it is wicked slow though.

But unless you are broke…you should do what Shane suggested and get it done on a Terranex. Its the best tool out there for this and if you care about your film, you should get it done right.

[John Pale]

Keep in mind Intel is not required, but there are limitations.

For instance, you cannot capture ProRes using a G5.

[John Pale]

You might want to take a look at “Traffic”

https://www.xmedit.com/

[John Pale]

No. Thats insane.

[John Pale]

FCP can upres within a sequence automatically, but the quality is generally not very good (but fine for roughing things out, until you replace it later).

There are a number of plugins available which do a better job within FCP. You can also send the clip to Motion or Compressor (included in the suite) for a superior upconvert. If its tape based material, capture cards from AJA and Blackmagic can upres on ingest.

I don’t think you will find it as convenient as Quantel, but you will have to consider what that convenience is worth to you when you compare the costs.

[John Pale]

[Alan Langdon] “I changed the DV NTSC capture settings to 30 fps (instead of 29.97) but this didn’t help at all.”

Do not do this. The actual frame rate of both non-drop and drop is 29.97. Only the counting system is different.

This is a message you get when you try to capture a clip already logged with drop frame timecode and the deck is playing a tape with non drop frame timecode. If this isn’t the case, then what is probably happening is that your camera/deck defaults to non drop frame when no tape is inserted or threaded. What you need to do is first play the tape a few seconds before initiating capture, so that the deck/camera reads some timecode and knows that a drop frame tape is inside it.
There may also be a menu setting for the default timecode format on the camera/deck, which should also eliminate the problem.