[Matt Doe]

I would recommend in the report that it be corrected, either by adjusting and laying back a new mix, or making a clone and adjusting the audio on the playback deck.

[Matt Doe]

As a former QC tech, I would most likely flag the low peaking audio as an issue. I suppose while not technically wrong as the audio does not peak about -10, I would make a note in the report that the audio peaks were low and should be looked at.

[Matt Doe]

I recently purchased and calibrated with the Spyder 3 Pro. I am very happy with the results on my 2 22″ Samsung LCDs (the model number of the displays eludes me).

I mainly work with FCP w/ some color correction in After Effects as well as my still photography in Lightroom

It was a straight forward process, the spyder program walks you through everything. It took about 5-10 minutes or so to calibrate each display. The colorimeter in the pro also has an ambient light sensor which I thought was a nice addition.

[Matt Doe]

Would the flags be carried on the downcovert through the Kona? As in, take HD-SDI out of the deck, the Kona downconverts to DV without pulling out the flagged frames, then reverse telecine the DV files to end up with 23.98 offline media? I am not very familiar with reverse telecine.

The show I am currently slipping in to place is 720/24 DVCProHD with flags (removed by the Kona card for both the offline and online captures).

The rest of our shows are 29.97, either 720p/60 DVCProHD, or 1080i from HDV cameras that we end up capturing at DVCProHD (we are moving to ProRes for all our onlines from here on out after this current show is donezo next week) for the online, and the DV offline material is downconverted through the Kona for the offlines.

[Matt Doe]

We cut our 23.98 offlines in 23.98 DV, set-up the Kona as if we were going to capture the HD, except we change the compressor in the Audio/Video settings to DV compression, end up with 720/480 23.98 Anamorphic DV for offline.

Could that be the issue? We have the Kona doing all the down-converts off the HD-SDI. In the 29.97 realm would taking the down-convert out of the deck be more reliable?

[Matt Doe]

We have run into the issue with both 1080i/59.94, 720p 60 and 720p 23.98 (with the Kona removing the flagged frames).

We are using Kona 3’s w/ 422 control for our uprez capture, though the offline material was captured on both LHi’s and LHe cards.

We plan on editing natively for our shows that have less footage, one offs and such. But the majority of our work has such a high volume of offline footage, in the thousands of hours (American Loggers and soon to be Real Housewives of Washington DC) that we would eat up all our 90TB XSAN pretty quick if we were to cut those series natively, thus the offline/online workflow.

We just installed all new ingest machines and are running tests and ensuring every machine is set up the same, so in the future hopefully that solves the issue.

[Matt Doe]

From the looks of your set-up it could be a processor speed issue. H.264 is a processor heavy codec. Have you been able to get any files from the 5D to play smoothly?

Could also be a drive speed issue, but I am thinking it has more to do with the processors in your machine.

[Matt Doe]

I also have 3 500gb drives in RAID 0 (striped) in my mac pro, works like a charm. Though every now and then I check with disc utility, as in the past I have had a few bum drives give off S.M.A.R.T errors in disc utility, ended up replacing all 3 drives at that time just to be safe and things have been fine for the past year, though it’s looking like I’m going to need to drop in 3, 1 TB drives in the near future as my work increases.

[Matt Doe]

Have you tried re-starting the machine without the drive plugged in. Then plugging it in? The drive does not show up in disc utility?

It is not Western Digital drives specifically, it is because they come (most of the time) formatted as FAT32 (4gb file size limit) or NTFS (no native write capability on a mac) which leads to problems, not the drive brand itself.

[Matt Doe]

Is there a specific reason you want to switch your picture locked timeline from DVCPro50 up to 10 bit uncompressed? I would say it is better to stay native to the material shot, unless going up to uncompressed provides better quality on your color grade or any effects you may use. From the looks of it, going uncompressed may not really be worth it.

In my experience if a client needed an uncompressed master file (which is rare), I have used the native format (in this case DVCPro 50) from there I would output to tape and re-capture at whatever format/resolution they needed. Uncompressed still required a decent RAID for playback however. The output/recapture, especially in shorter projects, was a much easier route than rendering up to 10bit.