[Keith Jacobsen]

Hi Peter,
The BBC have a very short approved list of HD cameras that they will accept for use and the 27 F & H are both there! They also have their list of settings for the Varicam for use on different productions like film for tv, wildlife, film for film etc… let me know if you’d like a copy of the parameters.

KJ

[Keith Jacobsen]

Hi Adrian,
I have just completed a shoot for the BBC in the last two weeks using an HDC27H for output in both PAL and HD. We shot at 720/25fps over 60 and edited on FCP.

The shoot and edit all worked fine with no issues but we did have to do a “hardware” upscale to 1080/50i for transmission on the BBC HD channel and deliver on HDCam SR tape… that’s they way the BBC require HD TX tapes at the moment – the PAL version was laid back onto DigiBeta (the film goes to air next week in SD on BBC Yorkshire over four nights and in HD on the BBC HD channel in September). We also had a premier of the finished film in front of 200 people in a major cinema and it looked just fantastic!

It is a fantastic camera to work with, having previously used DVCam and DigiBeta, and we used a 1400 deck to ingest the footage onto FCP using the HD SDI input of a Blackmagic Decklink card…. we also ingested using the firewire so that the director could look at the rushes on his laptop while traveling to each of the 43 locations we used!!

Like you I was a bit nervous about taking the plunge, but hell… I’m glad I did!

I hope this is of some help and please do feel free to message me.

Regards
KJ