[Keith Pratt]

Yeah, the Zoom seems to get nothing but praise. It almost makes me suspicious!

Did you mean the PMD671? If so I had that and the 661 on my shortlist to test.

Thanks!

[Keith Pratt]

On a tight budget the 2.66Ghz isn’t typically worth the premium, so I’d stick with the 2.26Ghz. Get 8GB RAM instead of 6.

You don’t need all those graphics cards unless you work on Wall Street. ATi cards work better than Nvidia with Color and Motion, so get one 4870.

If you aren’t working in anything beyond XDCam-EX, get a couple of large internal drives — one for scratch, one for archive — and a few externals to back them and your system drive up.

The RAID card does just what a RAID card should do. RAID is too lengthy a subject to get into here, so give it a Google. But modern drives are fast enough that you won’t need it if sticking with XDCam-EX.

Blackmagic video cards are for viewing on an external monitor. You’ll need one of these and a broadcast monitor if you want to do proper grading for TV.

“Broadcast ready” is more than just equipment. You need to really know what you are doing right throughout the process to avoid the pratfalls. That said, it depends where you’re going to be broadcasting as to how stringent they are on the requirements.

The RAM upgrade might be okay but don’t get additional hard drives from Apple. They charge a serious premium.

[Keith Pratt]

Sounds like a kernel panic. Open Disk Utility and Verify Disk and Repair Disk Permissions on the appropriate drive(s), and see if that makes a difference.

[Keith Pratt]

I have no idea why you’d run a HD-SDI to HDMI converter from the LHi. The card can be set to output RGB over HDMI at 23.976p, 24p, 25p, 29.97p, 30p, 50p, 59.94p and 60p — all of which the Dreamcolor accepts and processes accurately.

[Keith Pratt]

Do you have it daisy-chained with your camcorder? Firewire will run at the speed of the slowest connected device, which in this case would be the camcorder, running at FW100.

[Keith Pratt]

Seen as your output is 720×480 and most of your footage is 720×480, 720×480 is the way to go. 720×480 should display as 640×480, so if you transcode the security cam footage correctly it should be without pillarboxing and look in correct proportion.

If you really wanted to shoot 720p23.976, you could apply a 2:3 pulldown when converting to 480i29.97, and all should be fine.

[Keith Pratt]

Thanks for the reply. I figured Glue Tools would probably be my best bet if I was going to be regularly working with DPX.

[Keith Pratt]

There’s no need for alarm.

I’m using an HP DreamColor LP2480zx to monitor. There’s no HD-SDI (only HDMI) but it can handle all common frame rates and has user-selectable colour spaces ranging from Rec.601 to DCI-P3 — the caveat being that the “DreamColor engine” it uses to manage colour space only works with a progressive RGB signal. If you feed it interlaced YCbCr it will display it but with the monitor at full gamut and god-know-what gamma, giving a hugely saturated and wildly inaccurate look. But it’s an excellent display, and a genuine 10-bit panel to boot. So, that’s where the RGB obsession comes in.

Like I said, a lot of my work will be on DPX files, so for that I’m looking for a pathway for RGB right the way through, from file, through software, capture card and to display. For YCbCr stuff I need something that will do the conversion to RGB before the signal reaches the monitor. And that’s 10-bit YCbCr to 10-bit RGB.

The LHi may well be able to do all I want, but there are certain areas of vagueness I wanted to clear up before believing I’d found the Holy Grail.

[Keith Pratt]

Thanks for your replies.

The LHi has 3Gb/s HD-SDI as well, but the specs seem only to suggest can do 50/60p YCbCr with the added bandwidth. They are quite explicit that it does RGB over HDMI, but “RGB” is a term absent when they talk HD-SDI. I’ve sent them an e-mail, but not yet had a reply, so not sure.

I do already have a Blackmagic DeckLink, so a convertor like the new AJA Hi5 3G (3Gb/s HD-SDI and RGB) would be an option, but I thought it more likely that the LHi would be able to convert YCbCr to RGB on the fly.

[Keith Pratt]

Thanks again.

Delivery will often be DPX 1920×1080. I’m looking at a Gluetools workflow for this. I’ve not done much in Color and am currently also looking into whether the program itself handles black and white points or whether the LHi would.

I will also be doing some work in YCbCr, but need to monitor in RGB due to a quirk with my monitor. But that’s no problem if the LHi can convert the YCbCr to RGB on the fly.