[Ken Hon]

Aloha Brian,

Take a look at the new Dell 27″ monitor, which is a single link DVI 1920 by 1080 like the 24″. We originally had a 23 inch Cinema Display and one of the early 24″ dells. Our 24″ Dell didn’t have much latitude in display setup so it was hard to match colors with our HD CRT. The new 27″ has a lot more setup latitude and we got a much better setup. And wow is it big compared to a 24″ monitor. Be prepared with any of the Dells to crank the brightness down to about 50%, the way the come set up will blow you out of your chair it’s so bright. Anyway, you could use either the Dell 24 or Apple Cinema 23 for your Mac Monitor and the 27″ for monitoring video and as a second Mac Monitor. It costs about $1200 if I remember right.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Dave,

You’ve probably already checked this, but you need to have have an external sync generator to both the Kona card and deck and have the Kona sync set to REF IN and not to Freerun. If this isn’t the problem, then I’m out of ideas.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Colin,

We have a SDI Zapex encoder and we run the SDI out from the K3 box to SDI in on a deck and then take the SDI out from the deck and hook it to the Zapex SDI in. You’ve probably already tried this, but it works for us. You should also be able to set the Kona Card to free run I believe and it should work.

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Thank you Bob and Walter! I feel a bit like Dorothy. I’m off to click my ruby slippers now. Thanks again.

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Wow, AJA guys, this is a nice tool. Now how about making an afforable HD Vectorscope-Waveform monitor!! We love our Kona3 card, thanks for bringing quality at an affordable price.

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Frank,

You are of course correct, sorry about my sloppy wording. As you state only the frame count in the time code is dropped, not any frames.

Thanks Frank.

[Ken Hon]

The original B+W signal in the US was 30 frames per second (60 Hz). My understanding is that when the color subcarrier they changed the signal to 29.97; something to do with adding the color burst, I’d have to go look it up. PAL already had color, so it is a true 25 (50 Hz) frames per second. Don’t confuse Drop Frame and Non Drop Frame with the cycles per second. PAL has no NDF or DF mode as it is timed perfectly. In NTSC though, 30 frames come in 29.97 seconds or 24 frames come in 23.98 seconds. NDF is just letting this run as is. You can see what happens 30 frames occur slightly faster than 30 seconds so over a half hour or hour show your video clock has run ahead of your real time clock. DF time code drops a couple of frames per minute to slow the video clock back down and make video time equal to real time. This is only really important when you are doing broadcast work. We used to do everything in DF, but then found we had more DVD errors in DF than NDF. Now we do everything in NDF and just convert it if we need to sent it out for broadcast, which is only a small amount of our work anyway. This is my overly simplified understanding of the issue and it may not be exactly correct, but it gives you some idea that there are two distinct issues regarding NTSC Time code.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

We have a JVC 19″ HD CRT monitor that displays both HD and SD really well. Some people don’t like these as the colors and brightness are quite as good as the Sony Monitors, but they have the advantage of being cheaper and are still available. On our monitor the brightness settings are just about maxed out to get the color bars right, but it is setup. You can get the 17″ version for just under $2000, but need to get the component card to go with it. This nice thing about this card is that it has component in and out, so you can loop the signal through the JVC monitor and onto a 24″ Dell like Bob suggested (our Dell is way too bright and can’t really be adjusted, so while it looks nice it can’t really be used to adjust color very well). Here’s a link to the 17″ version at ProMax.

https://www2.promax.com/213524?sc=2&category=22519

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

The only professional DVD recorder I know of is the Pioneer LVX and it has optional SDI boards. It costs about 5k, not sure what the boards cost. I think it does a good job of encoding but I’ve never seen one. You would then have to rip your mpeg file off the disk and bring it into DVD SP, it’s not too hard.

https://www.pioneerelectronics.com/pna/v3/pg/top/product/0,,2076_310070063,00.html

The other way is to get an encoding board and put it in another computer. We have an old ZAPEX SDI encoding board that is great, we just dump straight from the Kona Card to the Zapex, encode on a PC and move it to the Mac on a firewire drive. I think Digital Rapids makes some nice cards for PC’s that don’t cost too much. I’m not sure there is anything around for Macs anymore, maybe someone else knows.

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Jeremy,

I built 2 Sonnet 4.5 TB 10 drive systems and one is the backup for the other. I’m using Retrospect to do an incremental backup of files and wrote a script to do it. You can schedule it or just click on it and it’ll back up anything new. We backup at the end of the day or during breaks in editing. And the back up doesn’t take so long cause the 2 RAIDS are fast. That way, we have zero down time if something goes bad. I’ve also got a 2 spare SATA drives of the same vintage to swap in case of a failure and a 1 TB firewire backup for doubling critical work along with 3 firewire drives that I rotate the system drive on using CarbonCopy. We’ve also got a 200 GB tape drive, but don’t use that so much except to archive some finished projects. Anyway, you can be ultra paranoid and still work on the cheaper end of things.

Aloha,

Ken