Ken Hon
Forum Replies Created
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Well, we haven’t had much use for our polarizer lately as we’ve had 30-40 inches of rain in the month or so since we got our camera. However, early on we went over to Kona and I shot some test footage of blue water and surfers with a polarizer and didn’t see any sort of color shift. I think We typically use a polarizer all the time, but it’s been way to cloudy lately. And by the way, we just shot some helicopter footage using a Kenyon gyro and the camera was great. None of the rolling shutter hysteria that’s going around the web.
Aloha,
Ken
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Aloha,
We have a Kona 3 and it works great. We can do analog conversions to SD by running them through a D-9 deck with SDI (sounds like you must have one of these too). However, if I was buying now, I’d spend the extra dollars and get the AJA IoHD as it does everything. The Kona LH is the cheapest, but it doesn’t do upconversion and cross conversions. The Kona 3 does all this but no analog in. IoHD does all this plus has hardware acceleration for ProRes 422 capture and can be used with a laptop. It would be easy to move around your facility and you can take it into the studio with a laptop and capture SDI out of the EX for green screen work. Cost is 1500 LH, 2500 K3, 3200 IoHD.
As far as monitors, the Dell 27″ is much better than the 24″, you can adjust colors much better(we have both and a Apple Cinema 23 which is too expensive and doesn’t have anything but DVI inputs). We run the component out of our Kona 3 to the component in of the Dell. Still it is not a broadcast monitor, so you might want to shell out for a good LCD. I think JVC makes a “relatively” inexpensive one. We have a JVC 19″ HD CRT that is looped with our Dell so we can see both the true color and the big screen, but you would probably do best with a LCD monitor.
The LCD screen on the EX is better than your SD monitor I think, but you can try it.
Aloha,
Ken
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Aloha,
This is something that has annoyed me since Sony brought out the Z1. Before that you could get both a UV and a Polarizer under the hood of a 170. Then with the Z1 you could only get either the polarizer or the UV filter. Now with the EX1, we can only get the UV filter on, the polarizer won’t fit. I suppose I could get one of the thinner wide angle polarizers and see if it works, but jeez would it kill them to make a sunshade that you could fit 2 filters under. I really don’t like removing the UV filter as there are generally a lot of tiny particles being blown around where we work. Anybody have recommendations for a light, sturdy shade that you can fit 2 filters under?Mahalo,
Ken
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Aloha Forrest,
Well at first it sucked because I had it attached to the USB on the Cinema Display that was hooked up to the computer with a 15′ USB repeater that evidently made this USB 1. Then I hooked it up to a hub hooked directly to the computer. I haven’t directly measured the speed, but it appears to be moving stuff near max USB 2 speeds. Some other folks have posted numbers in the CineAlta forum I think. But the net result is that it’s not a problem. It’s a whole lot faster than capture from tape and easier too as you get to see clip images and preview them if you want while another clip is downloading.
Aloha,
Ken
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My brain is like swiss cheese. A couple of other things I didn’t mention.
I’m using Quicktime 7.3 and it works fine.
However, I’ve read a couple of reports that there may be some problems with 7.4. Don’t know for sure if this is true.
Also we have a Kona 3 with version 4 of the drivers loaded under OSX 4.11
Ken
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Aloha Bob,
One other thing that you might come across. There are two pieces of software for the EX1
XDCAM transfer (works within FCP on both G5 and Intel Macs)
XDCAM clipbrowser–this works only on Intel Macs and I think is a stand alone clip viewer. Since I don’t have an Intel Mac I haven’t looked into this at all.
Aloha,
Ken
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Aloha Bob,
We’ve had one for about a month now and have had no problems.
We are using it with a Mac G5 Quad and a SxS card reader attached via USB. You need to have FCP 2.02 installed (2.0 doesn’t work) and have installed the SxS card reader driver from Sony along with the XDCAM transfer software.
Use the Easy Setup for the type of XDCAM footage you want
Go to file import SONY XDCAM
Brings up the XDCAM software showing thumbnails of your clips (you can click on clips and view them).
Select the clips you want to import (using shift for multiple clips)
Hit Import and it brings them into FCP by giving them a Quicktime Wrapper.What I’ve been doing for archive is the following:
Copy the entire card contents to our eSATA RAID (you must copy the BPAV folder on the card)
I then import clips I want from the RAID.
Rest of Clips are left on RAID
Use Retrospect to do a incremental duplicate to another RAID every day.
Do incremental Backup to Firewire drives once a week.When you are ready to wipe the cards, it seems to be best to do this in the camera to get them formatted correctly. I haven’t tried formatting them on the Mac.
I shot some surfers just for fun at a variety of frame rates and I’m totally impressed with the XDCAM codec, it really holds up nicely even in scenes panning across breaking waves following a surfer. The nice thing about FCP is you can drop older HDV files onto the XDCAM timeline and it conforms them in the background.
Hope this is helpful.
Aloha,
Ken
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Yikes! Wish I had more ideas but I don’t. We haven’t seen this problem and hope we don’t.
Aloha,
Ken
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Sounds like you may have FCP 2 and need to apply the update to FCP 2.02.
https://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/download/
Don’t forget you have to apply the Universal Upgrades in order first (1 then 2) and then FCP 2.02
If that’s not it, I’m out of ideas.
Aloha,
Ken
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Aloha,
It’s a roll of the dice evidently with the MacPro’s.
Here is what Apple says:
https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304936I can tell you it works fine with a G5 quad and an ATTO SCSI card.
I’m not sure how well using discs to master works these days. We tried it a couple of years ago and found we had about 1% returns, unacceptable. DLT tape masters almost no returns. That said we are doing single sided DVD and it seems there may be some additional issues writing out the 2 DLT tapes needed for double sided. Best to talk to your replicator and see what they say.
Aloha,
Ken