Matt Riley
6
COW Coins
7
Storage & Archiving Coins
Forum Replies Created
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The Bravia we are driving is 1080 native, so we want to stay in the 1080 world for that one for sure.
The Panasonic BT-LH1700W monitor is 720 native but I find it handles 1080 rather well. And, it has no problems displaying the 23.98 frame rate, so I’d rather send it the 1080/23.98 from the Kona as well, as opposed to a frame duplicated 720/60.
As somewhat of a wrap-up to all of this, we did receive the AJA HDP converter unit yesterday and installed it. We are liking the results, so the box seems to be doing the right kind of magic for us. Woohoo!
The other workarounds proved to not be viable solutions for us. I had thought about having the displays remove the pull-down from a 1080/29.97 signal from the Kona card, but the Sony monitor did not offer that option after getting out of 480i resolution, so no dice there.
Anyway, the short of it is that after some brief testing yesterday with the HDP adapter we are rather happy. We will be using this setup for a finishing session next week (maiden voyage for the system) so hopefully everything holds up well for that.
-Matt
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[Shane Ross] “I swear the HVX-200 (I don’t have the camera on me, and I have little shooting experience with it) has a 1080 24PA setting.
Hope someone with the camera chimes in.”
The HVX-200 can shoot 1080/24p (traditional 3:2 pull-down inserted), 1080/24pa (advanced pull-down inserted) or 1080/30p. Unfortunately, there is no 1080/24pn mode to save room on the cards. 🙂
-Matt
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[gary adcock] “I am on my laptop and cannot check that until sunday but I am pretty sure if you
set the secondary SDI channel to 1080 29.97 and the main channel to 1080 23.98 you can output the content both ways.I will try it tomorrow when I get back to my office”
No go for me. The Kona control panel won’t allow for a configuration like this, at least not that I can figure out.
The HDP converter is due for arrival today at some time via Fed Ex, so after I get that installed I’ll post back and let everyone know how it went. Having this device in the pipeline should make things easier (output 1080/23.98 and convert the signal for only the display that requires the different frame rate).
-Matt
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[gary adcock] “That Kona card has multiple SDI and Comp outputs– set one to add pulldown and the other to show the straight video. “
I asked AJA support if this was possible and they told me it wasn’t. Clearly I’ll have to do some experimenting to see if this will work or not.
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[David Roth Weiss] “This is a very common method for displaying progressive video on inexpensive plasmas. Professionals all over Hollywood, including me, use Panasonic plasmas as client monitors, and displaying at 29.97 is how its done. What are your concerns?”
My concern is that I don’t like adding extra frames to anything unless I have to.
In our situation, we have two displays we are dealing with; one is capable of displaying the frame rate we are natively working in (the Panasonic BT-LH1700W) and one is not (the Sony Bravia). If I have FCP add the pulldown during playback, the Bravia works fine but the Panasonic monitor looks worse. I could enable the 3:2 pulldown removal on the Bravia which would clean things up but I honestly don’t know if the Panasonic monitor has the option to remove pulldown (I’ve never had to look, but I’m planning on doing so Monday). While this back and forth with pulldown might work, I don’t yet know how or if it will work when outputting through the Kona card from other applications, such as After Effects or Color. I need to do some testing with these.
If FCP was the only application I was driving the Kona card with, I might be able to get by with adding pulldown in FCP and removing it on the displays. However, I think the HDP converter may still be the way to go because of After Effects and the like.
-Matt
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Thanks for the monitor tip. When we upgraded our client monitors just before the end of the year we settled on the Sony Bravia LCDs. Since we have 3 of them, I guess you could say we sort of standardized on that product line, for better or worse. I personally find the image produced by the Bravias to be a bit harsh, much like most other LCD displays. But our clients seem to like them, which is the point, I guess.
Honestly, we didn’t give the Panasonic displays a fair look for various reasons, the chief one being the old “Sony no bologne” train of thought. When you are looking for a client display for your edit suite, you often consider the presentation of the picture almost as much as the picture itself. In this area, the Sony Bravias hooked us – they have an impressively slick frame (when ordered in black) with a little glowing white Sony logo at the bottom. Yum. That caught our attention in much the same way a mini skirt does: not necessarily practical, but it sure does look good. 🙂
-Matt
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[Bob Zelin] “I too cannot understand, that if you have a PROFESSIONAL requirement for 1080p, and must monitor in 1080p, why on earth are you using a consumer TV set with HDMI ?
Bob Zelin”
Just trying to save where we can, like everyone else. Sometimes you get burned a bit. 😉
We already purchased the 17″ Panasonic LCD monitor as our “pro” model for this suite and we wanted something larger for awe factor for a client display. The SDI input on this model has no problems displaying whatever we send to it; of course, that’s why it is a third of the size but costs more than the Bravia.
So, Sony’s top-end consumer model seemed a logical choice without having to rob a bank. We knew going in that if we wanted a model with SDI it would simplify our connection scheme but it also more than triples the entry level for the display.
If the HDP converter works for our purposes, the combined cost will still be quite a bit cheaper than stepping up to the sony model with SDI input that supports 1080/24p natively. It’s an acceptable trade-off for us for a client monitor.
Live and learn, I suppose.
-Matt
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I just got off the phone with AJA for the fifth time today. The good news is that they have a workaround they are shipping to me to try (swapping out the Hi5 for the HDP converter). The bad news is that it took the better part of a day and two different support people to arrive at this solution. I suppose, though… It is Friday after all. 😉
Here’s to hoping the HDP does the magic we are looking for so we can enjoy our Kona card a bit more.*
-Matt
*The magic that is required is a frame rate converter, which the HDP is. AJA was able to determine that our Sony Bravia LCD only supports 1080p/60, which the Hi5 is not capable of doing. The HDP, though, is supposed to be able to take 1080p/23.98 output from the Kona card’s SDI out and convert it to 1080/60p over a DVI connection. So, we then have to purchase a DVI to HDMI converter cable to connect it to our Sony display (it has no DVI input).
AJA support is sending me the HDP converter unit on a trial basis for 30 days (should be here Monday) to see if it works like we are hoping. Now that’s the support I was expecting. Yeah!
In the meantime, the second support person was nice enough to provide a workaround for FInal Cut Pro as a fallback in case any of this doesn’t work (or we don’t want to spend the extra money to get the HDP instead of the Hi5). He told me to set FCP’s video output to 1080i/29.97 which will add 3:2 pulldown in the Kona card to make my 1080p/23.98 sequence play through the Hi5 and to the Sony display. While not ideal, it was nice to be offered another option to get us by.
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I have TC showing up fine in my h.264 exports (tested two exported as ref. movies from FCP, then encoded with compressor).
-Matt
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Compressor can use all 8 cores on the latest Mac Pros. They showed this during the product launch demo Sunday.
I asked about Color and the answer I got was that Color is not (yet) optimized to take full advantage of all 8 cores. How many cores it can take advantage of, I don’t know, but I was told there is no current conflict with running Color on the 8 core Macs. It just doesn’t use all the horsepower available. Aside from rendering, though, I believe Color is really more about the power of the GPU rather than the CPU. So, a more powerful graphics card will probably do more for you when using Color than a multi-core machine.
-Matt