[Joseph Owens]

Sounds like semantics to me.

“Output fields” I would expect one field at a time, but not necessarily plural. If unchecked, I’d expect “Frames”, which of course if interlaced are plural fields.
Its a little different than the Kona menu protocol which might just be better English.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

[Jeremy Garchow] “But is it little and red?”

And topless.

Happy New Year.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

HDV, as far as i know, only records 60i, as it doesn’t have the bandwidth to deal with progressive frames, and its a Long-GOP format, anyway. Your “23.98” is a camera frame rate, and it gets recorded to tape with a field cadence, like film’s 2:3 strategy of redundant fields.

This is probably why it looks “stuttery”. There is no plugin for HDV that removes the cadence and allows you to work with HDV at 23.98 as there is with DVCProHD720p60. Unless there has been a recent development, the same situation exists with DVCProHD1080i60, which does not allow automatic removal of “pulldown” AP frames.

If FCP/Kona does NOT recognize the incoming media stream at a requested frame rate, then it is NOT that frame rate. If it does recognize the media at a set frame rate, rest assured, that’s what it is, no matter what an operator might have thought they were shooting. This is very poorly understood industry-wide.

Have you tried capturing the footage “wild”? It may be a pre-roll issue if its a very short clip.

Set the device as “uncontrollable”, press play, and “Capture Now”. I’ve been forced to do this a number of times when camera operators have “double clutched”, but now they’ve decided they’ve gotta have it, no matter how short the clip is.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

Kona3 analog outputs feature S-VHS (Y/C) outputs, so no conversion is necessary except wiring. Check your control panel for this option. You can also output Betacam Y/R-Y/B-Y if you have an SP deck.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

The vast majority of my work is 1920×1080, 16×9. That said, many of my clients bring a mix of source material, which I naturally “upconvert” or at least digitize off tape (superior results using the Kona3 input) at that resolution. It does not convert SD into HD by inventing lost detail — it merely oversamples something that was 720×486 — and if the original was very high quality, you can expect not to lose anything.

The real trick with a lot of legacy footage is that its 4×3, or worse, 16×9 letterboxed. Best case scenario is that the DBeta, or whatever, was mastered 16×9 anamorphic. That actually works quite well. Nevertheless, even the Kona “blow-up” strategies work amazingly well.

I am required to do software “uprez” as well. Case in point a couple of days ago, I got a downloaded al-Jazeera clip (intended for a 1080i60 timeline) which arrived 1280×720 25p mpg4. Is there anything about this clip which isn’t completely wrong for its intended use? But Compressor, cranked up to its “best” settings, at least yielded a result which the producer said looked “a bit too good”, now we have to put all the station bugs back in to make it look like streamed media again. All I see that’s really objectionable, artifact-wise, besides a general softness, is of course the mpg block compression.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

I thought it might be a prefs issue and did the old superstitious mantra “trash prefs”. I was also starting to get random crashes with various plugins, specifically the AJA Kona Plugin for FCP.

No dice, plus I got to reset all my preferences, trims, offsets, paths, default directories, and so on.

I can’t see how this cannot be a system problem, since resetting the system fixes it (at least temporarily).

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

Some people need to have their amplifiers marked with “11”.

Seriously, even if the numbers are going up, the quality is still going down.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

Regarding the Cubix PCIe extender chassis, it doesn’t really seem like there is much of a functional difference between them, reading between the lines on their website. At this point, I’m really only weighing the pros and cons of the rackmount and Desktop4 upgraded to x16, as several clients have already indicated interest in proceeding into the the world of 3D, and of course the more GPUs, the better. And the price difference moving up for expandibility seems to favor the poly-slot offerings for starters.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

Yes. Now we’re talkin’.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

I see this behaviour when recording to the UVW1800 in my rack. I do feed it Ext Sync from a Gen10, but only to the External Sync INput and not looped through to the video Input. All my recording to the deck is in Y, R-Y, B-Y analog from the Kona3 card.

The vertical stepping you see is normal TBC offset timing error. When you play the tape back, it is normal, correct? The vertical sync roll does not occur? If the V-sync interference was real, you would likely get a stable picture, where a black bar rolled through the actual active image.

This was a feature of the Ampex VPR2, where a poor external sync would actually result in a sync bar rolling through picture image. That was real handy.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?