Michael Gissing
Forum Replies Created
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Did you have the Kona and deck referenced? If you don’t have a reference video signal, then I suspect the Kona will generate a sync signal that you can feed into the deck (I have a Decklink which does this).
Without reference it is more likely that there will be phantom breaks. When you capture via firewire, FCP syncs to the incoming data which may explain the different capture behaviour.
It is also possible to capture as HDV but render in ProRes. It is a setting in sequence settings under the render tab.
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Your images off the camera are probably huge. For DV Pal you need to convert the images to something closer to your sequence resolution which is 720 x 576. This is rectangular pixel so appears anamorphic or stretched. If you are doing moves on your images, try saving them at double this pixel resolution.
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Have you lost any other CMD + functions? Perhaps your keyboard is the problem.
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You can make a QT in SD directly from your HD sequence, either via AT conversion or Compressor. No real need to nest.
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Not sure why you would avoid an amp. They can be very useful. For example you can have the monitor outputs from various decks or cameras and use the amp switching to check both FCP and the machines directly. Very handy if you just want to check audio on a tape without having to use capture to monitor back via the card. Your amp may have a radio to listen to during interminable rendering. It might also have a Dolby decoder to check your DVDs. Most modern amps even allow you to have video follow audio either via composite or S-video inputs & outputs. They can also allow you to have multiple outputs of video & audio if you are recording a VHS & DVD whilst doing a playout to digi beta. In fact, I can’t think of a reason to only have self powered speakers in an edit suite.
Also if you have the computer in the same room, a pair of headphones is the cheapest way to have quality monitoring and exclude noise and bad acoustics.
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What version drivers are you using for the Decklink? I had a brief period with the same accuracy problem but the latest drivers fixed that. I am going out to digi and HDCam.
Obviously you have reference video connected or you are using the black output from the Decklink to sync.
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Mortimer, I have had projects that were captured from HDV that were a nightmare to recapture and others that were over a thousand edits and perfectly resynced. The secret to shooting HDV seems to be start each tape at zero, rather than set a timecode. During capture, don’t ignore timecode breaks. Yes HDV seems to have constant breaks but often this turns out to be the default capture option of deliberately breaking shots with every camera stop start. This is in the capture window set up tabs. HDV does have breaks. So does DV. Don’t ignore them.
HDV in my experience is no worse than DV when it first introduced us to firewire capture & control. Everyone said it wasn’t real timecode and not frame accurate. I don’t hear those complaints any more as we have learned to deal with it. HDV still seems to confuse but I have found operator error the major cause of capture horror stories. A lot of beard stroking and mutterings about “long GOP” seems to surround HDV posts. Since FCS2,I have been happy to recommend using HDV native on many projects using the rules I have outlined without any more problems than a DV job. Reading the Cow, I see more posts about the horrors of P2. Every format has issues that require research and management, from the pre production stage onwards.
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The important info here is your drive speed and capacity. Unless you have a RAID and at least 1.5 TB of storage free then editing an hours worth of rushes plus renders in Uncompressed HD is going to require this sort of hard drive.
Given your final output, my suggestion is to capture directly from the HDCam as standard def uncompressed, but again, only if you hard drives are capable of the SD data rate. Either do the down convert with your card or the SD SDI outputs from the HDCams are also excellent down converters.
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In the capture window there is a default selection on one of the tabs to break capture on every camera stop. It should by default be deselected as it is, by general consensus, not desired. Instead you need to find this and deselect it.
I don’t have my FCP open at the moment so I can’t be more specific.
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If the job is just HDV then the easiest path is capture as HDV native codec and render pro res. No point in transcoding to DVCPro HD that I can see. FCP has been behaving well for me with that workflow.
Capturing without timecode is also a big no no in my opinion.