[Ken Hon]

Ben was actually so far ahead of his time he invented the surge protector long before Edison had seen the light. Thank goodness he was holding that ham sandwich at the time. This must have been the event that led to melted cheese on sandwiches and eventually to his famous Philly cheese steak recipe “Thou gather thy friends and together shall you hoist one milk cow to the roof of thy tallest building. Whence accomplished, tie thy kite string to thy cow bell and standest back as far as thy can while holding thy open loaf skyward till it is filled with cheese and steak”. May Ron forgive my cowsacrilege….

[Ken Hon]

You might also talk to the folks that make Rosetta Stone converters. We have used these cables to go from RS-422 to RS-232 ports on a PC. They would know if any of their cables might do the job for you. I would think you could take the normal cable from that is made to connect a RS-422 deck to a RS-232 computer and run it in reverse. However, there may be voltage differences that I’m not aware of doing this. Worth asking them, they’re very helpful and the integrated cables are clean with just a slightly larger attachment at one end that does the conversion.

https://www.addenda-elect.com/product.htm

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Mahalo Nui Loa (great big thank you) Jeff

Having the right tools will make the transition much easier.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Ron,

Love the dancing cow icon in your post. And Las Vegas, well to each his/her own, but they can keep it as far as I’m concerned. I do like some of the desert around there though, including that big canyon thingie nearby.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Sarah,

Just to reinforce Dave’s point, SCSI devices are really operating system neutral, that is all of the operating systems support them. For a DLT drive to work, you must have a software program that supports the drive to do a specific job. DLT tape is not like a hard drive, it has a very specific data structure that must be written to it for DVD replication. Virtually all major programs including DVD SP support this write structure which is why it’s become a defacto authoring standard. Now, for the drives. All of the early DLT IV drives (which is what you want, DLT 3 will not work, nor will DLT 1 which is a totally different tape format) were built by Quantum and rebranded. So any DLT IV 4000 model is a Quantum and will work just fine. Not sure about who besides Quantum makes 7000 models, but all of those will work fine too, just more expensive due to higher capacity (which you don’t need). The one compatibility hang up is the type of SCSI connector on the back of the drive. There are at least 3 (and maybe more) types you are likely to encounter. The oldest is the very slow 25 pin, then 50 pin, and finally 68 pin connectors. The drive will work with any of these, but you will probably need a 68 pin connector for any modern LVD SCSI card in you computer. It is also very easy to change the connectors if you get a drive with several of them. You just pop the cover and replace a ribbon cable and the connector, something like 4 or 8 screws, can’t remember exactly. One last tip, the DLT drives are very slow devices and will slow down the RW speed on any RAID arrays etc you have on that SCSI channel. So only turn it on when you need to write a DLT tape or it will slow down the RAID throughput on your system (if you have SCSI Raid Arrays).

Aloha,

Ken

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Thanks Graeme

[Ken Hon]

Graeme,

I agree that the CRT’s are probably giving us an image that nobody will ever see again since they are going the way of the dinosaur. The things I was seeing on the Dell monitor go beyond the types of artifacting that you are describing though (and I agree would smoothed out on the CRT). When most of the frame is in motion the entire image goes very soft on the Dell, almost defocussed or blurry while it stays sharp on the CRT. This also happened when we hooked up an FX-1 with component out to both monitors simultaneously and just did live pans around our studio (no record to tape, should be no MPEG compression from the camera). The Dell showed the same effects and even had some ghosting. Hard to know if this is a problem with A/D conversion in the monitor or how the Dell handles interlacing or maybe even our monitor is not working properly? Guess I should look into that as well. LCD’s as a video display are pretty new to me and we don’t have a lot of things to compare it against. But it really made me think that the higher motion footage from the FX-1 was trash and it certainly doesn’t appear to be (though I won’t quibble about the other kinds of artifacts you mentioned). We do have a new Mac Quad on order with a Kona board and a 23″ display and will probably get a converter to use it to view video on. Do you have a preference between the lower priced AJA converter and the BlackMagic one (HDSDI-DVI)?

[Ken Hon]

[Steve Connor] “Ah yes, the urban myth, HDV can’t film anything that moves!”

[David Saraceno] I still do not understand this statement on HDV. I keep looking for footage that supports it, and there some issues we’ve seen on heavily leaved trees on a very fast pan.

Aloha Steve and David,

I’ll tell you what made me think our footage from the FX-1 was breaking down under motion was viewing it on a Dell 2405 monitor. Now that I’ve seen a bit on a JVC CRT monitor, it is clear that the Dell monitor looks very blurry when displaying movement and has a fair amount of ghosting too. The HDV looked very nice on the JVC monitor and just attaching the camera to the Dell Monitor with no compression made the same smearing of the picture during movement. Turns out that Adam Wilt has already commented on these problems.

https://www.adamwilt.com/HDV/hp2335.html

However, anyone that has only an HDV camera and a Dell monitor might think that it is the HDV codec breaking down, but that sure doesn’t appear to be the case.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Bob,

Sorry if I wasn’t clear about what our current setup is. We do have a blackburst generator currently feeding each of the decks and the PC based NLE. Every deck has an individual blackburst feed and so does the NLE. They are all terminated and we don’t having any looping reference signals.

We feed almost everything into our current NLE via SDI on the D9 deck (we can run component in to this deck from our older decks and take out an SDI signal that we feed to the NLE). We also have a Miranda Firewire to SDI converter that we use to bring in the signal from the DV deck.

Since the Kona 3 is also SDI based, I figured we could feed it the same way we have been currently working with our NLE. If that doesn’t prove to work cleanly we’ll get an AJA IO.

What I wasn’t clear on was whether we needed some type of different blackburst generator for the HD end and you’ve answered that. Thanks for your help, I appreciate it.

And we do have a Mac Quad with SATA arrays etc. on order to go with the Kona 3 board. We’ll have a bit of a learning curve, but FCP on the Mac seems like it will be around for a while and I don’t want to have to change NLE’s again if possible (or at least for a while).

And I know, MII is the most antiquated thing around, but we have alot of old tapes that we access once in a while, so we keep it around.

The JVC D9 camera and deck have been amazing for the money we have in them. Unfortunately they are on the same evolutionary line as the dodo bird. Strange that JVC developed the technology that Panasonic is using for DVCPRO HD but never carried through with it. So much for that grand plan of mine! Since we’re in the middle of nowhere Hawaii, we just send D9 tapes to a transfer house there in LA, who dubs them to digibeta for clients.

Thanks again for your help,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Bob,

Thank you for your kind reply, sorry about the deck information. Our studio is sort of like Battlestar Galatica, a rag tag fleet of off brand stuff. The deck we use most to record to is a JVC BRD 750 D9 deck with a SDI card. We also have a JVC BRD 600U with component and firewire that we occasionally use to make DV tapes for people and an older Panasonic MII deck. We don’t have the Sony HDV deck, we’ve just been digitizing from an FX-1 but it’s not going to cut it for us and we will be getting a HVX-200 when they become more available and have a field disk drive unit available.

All of our current decks are currently synched to our PC system, and it wouldn’t be hard to keep this the same.

So, I’m inferring from what you said in your first post, that we should keep them synched and run a synch cable to the K3 card. So there is no need for any type of HD synch if there is no HD deck?

And yeah, I know the LHe would have allowed direct input of the Sony HD Component, but we really wanted to be able to have the upconverting ability in house to evaluate older stock footage and to upconvert some programs we had done before. I figured that if we need to bring in component HD, we can just get a component to HD-SDI converter to handle it.

Thanks again for your time and expertise,

Aloha,

Ken