Mark Maness
Forum Replies Created
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I understand….
Tape is not the best solution but it has been tested and tried over the past 40 years or so…. Actually, we use XDCAM HD so are not tape based masters here. BUT when it comes to hard drives, tape has a much long shelf life than a hard drive. A hard drive that sits still on a shelf for a year will more than likely be dead. I have three hard drives that are about three years old that now act as door stops. DVDs… the jury is still out on how long they will last. And Blu-Ray…. we have no idea.
We don’t need to start a flame war… we all have our own opinions and horror stories to share. The future of our industry is going digital and so will archival methods. Its just that the archival methods are moving much much slower than the rest of the industry.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “The issue is in the long GOP, once you compress it is gone, HDV 25Mbs, DVCPRO HD Iframe only 100Mbs. So if you compress to a Long GOP Master, playing it out into a DVCPRO HD timeline does not make it 100Mbs in it performance. It only edits like 100Mbs. The footage still has all of the attributes of HDV. In other words, 4:2:0 turned into 4:2:2 at the time of editing, is not real 4:2:2, your original does not have the original color, you gave that away in compression. Long GOP, 15 Frames turned into I frame does not make it like an original I frame recording, and so on.”
I will agree with you 100 percent, Jan. But we do have to look at a budget and P2 is just too expensive to us to run in our situation. If the HX200 camera could record to tape, you’d be in business with us. It all comes down to the cost of running the camera as compared to the final output.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
Bud…
I’d suggest that you look into getting an upgrade of FCP to 5.1 and you can run OS 10.4.8 on your G4. I have one in our facility that I use for compressing video to DVDs. It has all of the latest software and it runs just fine.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
If you get too much work… I’ll take them off your hands, Walter!
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
With my luck… Apple will probably announce the Octo core Mac Pro…
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
I hear ya! Hopefully, if Panasonic wants to stay on top of the business, they’d better announce something at NAB on these storage solutions.
Storage is a MAJOR consider with us and should be for everyone else, too. We looked at the Canon also… BUT there was one major issue that we didn’t agree with that Canon dropped the ball on… No deck. Canon’s tapes don’t always work in other machines, either. Big drawback for us…
We ended up going with the XDCAM HD F350 camera with Sony Z1U’s as secondary cameras. In the real near future, we are looking at trading in the Z1Us for V1Us so that we have full compatibility with XDCAM HD.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
I’m going to throw in my two cents…
My main concern is the P2 thing. Before I get started, I’m not bashing the P2 concept. I’m just not a fan of any format that has not permanent storage solution. In order to use P2, you have to shoot with it and dump it to a hard drive for use. My issue is what is a good backup medium for this. At the moment, there’s not much other than lots of dual-layer DVDs or Blu-Ray data dics. Hard drives are NOT a long term solution.
I’ll lean with the Sony concept any day with this camera. You have a tape drive and a hard drive solution that can be used at the same time. When you get done, you dump your footage to your RAID and your tapes are used as backup. Great solution to the P2 issue.
Now, when you are comparing the cameras directly… I would probably lean towards the Panasonic HVX200. It shoots an amazingly gorgeous picture. Sony’s V1U is still new and I haven’t gotten my hands on it yet to test its quality (I’m hoping to do this very soon).
My co-worker has recently shot a small budget film using the Panasonic HVX200 and while it has gorgeous pictures, dealing with the P2 issue was a nightmare. As a matter of fact, we really don’t have a hard permanent storage copy of it yet (budgetary reasons). While we did use a Firestore drive with it, it still makes us nervoucs to think that the only copy of the raw footage resides on our TerraBlock with a firewire drive as a backup to that.
Workflow-wise…. Yeah, there are some issues with the Sony V1U and FCP at the moment, BUT I am fairly sure that these issues will be worked out sometime around NAB. One solution to most of the issues are that you can digitize all of your footage into the DVCProHD codec and not even bother with the HDV codec. DVCProHD covers all of your bases with the formats.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
I do it everyday…. sometimes multiple time a day. Not much problems at all. Just the occassional render file lost.
There is one issue that you need to know about… When you open a project on you Mac Pro box, delete the Waveform Cache files first before opening FCP. This way you can see the audio waveforms.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
Thanks for your response…
Would you be able to describe the process of how to do this in Shake? If not, do you know of a resource that I could use to learn the basics of Shake.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
I totally agree with Walter…
Don’t sacrifice quality for budget, it will only bite you in the long run. AJA does have the best support in the industry, and that means everything in this business when the cards are down.
The AJA Kona LH will be your best solution for the money. Yeah, you can get the Blackmagic BUT I have heard countless stories from people that the support is absolutely terrible.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com