[Michael]

I use a 1/4 black ProMist on almost everything I shoot and it’s amazing. Once in a while I’ll use a UV filter as well, but the 1/4 black is a staple in my rig.

-mjd

[Michael]

Tips:

You should NOT use a camcorder as a deck. Camcorder heads are made of a softer material and don’t withstand the shuttle/searching that PB/REC decks are designed to handle. The movements are much more fragile, too. If you continuously use a camcorder as a deck you will need to service it a lot. The best deal going is the DSR-11. You can pick one up on eBay for the price of a mid-level camera.

Make sure you’re using Panasonic Master Tape in the camera (it’s a white box with silver or gold banners and blue print). Don’t use Sony tape. They are made of different compounds. I get them mixed up, but one uses a wet base, the other dry. Putting one in the other is not good.

You’ve got a great camera, don’t gunk it up with cheap tape. Definitely avoid consumer tape in that camera. Don’t go into Walgreen’s and pick up any old DV tape. You’ve got a high-end camera and should treat it as such.

-mjd

[Michael]

Quote:
>Decks like the 1500, when using SDI actually bypasses the firewire degradation, and since it comes right off the TBC it is >being “psuedo” upsampled to 4:2:2. That’s one of the reasons it looks so clean…

Firewire doesn’t cause any degradation in and of itself. There’s no encoding or decoding going on during the send over firewire. It’s just a data stream off of the tape, much like a hard drive. The degradation comes from the codec on the receiving end. SDI recording looks clean because you’re using the uncompressed codec, Apple’s DV codec, though fine on a consumer level, is dirty under technical analysis. As I wrote, I’ve seen tests that actually verify this. An outboard converter is just doing what the 1500 is doing inside the machine. As long as the converter is of good quality, there shouldn’t be any perceptible difference. If you know otherwise, please explain!

-mjd

[Michael]

I’m in L.A., and at the FCPUG meeting about a year ago ProMax did a test, one showing DV footage captured ‘native’ and the other showing DV footage converted to SDI then captured 10 bit uncompressed. The SDI footage was so clean you could actually pull a chroma key. It was stunning. What we determined is that the Apple DV codec introduces artifacts even though it’s not compressing the data.

Here’s the good news (and why ProMax was eager to do the demonstration!)… ProMax makes a Digital Media Converter for $1500 bucks that will let you hook your firewire output of the deck into the box, and convert deck control, timecode and SDI out for Io capture. I’m on the waiting list as the box is sold out and on back-order.

-mjd