[Paul Dickin]

[Graeme Nattress] “it’s a pain sometimes to get FCP to acknowledge that playback format has been flipped. I have to restart FCP, restart the deck, and muck around like that until it functions in the right mode again.”
Hi
Its not just FCP that has problems, Mac OS X sometimes needs to be initialised to respond to the correct FW mode once the DSR-25 or 11 deck has been switched. Make the change, power up the deck, and restart OS X. Then restarting FCP will correctly initialise Log and Capture.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
I used an early version of After Effects for the NTSC>PAL conversion, and it did an OK job – its scaling is quite good and the Field Blending gives steady motion, albeit somewhat blurry.
As soon as the Nattress plug-in became available my producer bought it and it is used exclusively – so much so that I haven’t fully test-driven Compressor for the job – one of these days I will get around to it 😉

I also have an Alchemist NTSC conversion of a PAL movie for a DVD job I did a while ago, so I was going to compare a Nattress conversion of the same footage (also Compressor) when I get the aforesaid round tuit 🙂
I’ll post back with the results….

[Paul Dickin]

[Alexander] “Now I’m really missing out.
Before capture you still have to set the format (PAL or NTSC) in iMovie- all/any version, which format did you select?
Are you saying that you can capture NTSC from the PAL camera via the deck? I’ll bet if you can’t do it via fire-wire, there must be a standards conversion happening,
either in the deck or with an FCP render.

In my case – PAL TRV-900E containing an NTSC miniDV tape – trying to capture this with FCP (or Premiere) Capture Now (NTSC capture, uncontrollable device) causes the capture to abort, because although there is a genuine NTSC DV data-stream arriving via FW, there is also some sort of ident signal from the camcorder identifying it as a PAL device, which Capture Now is checking during its initialisation procedure.

So I connected a Canopus ADVC device set up in NTSC mode via FW to the Mac (removing the TRV-900E temporarily) and initialised Log and Capture. Analogue capture worked fine using this, but DV passthrough of the NTSC data from the 900E failed – not suprisingly as two FW video devices never work successfully connected simultaneously.

So. after initialising NTSC Capture Now with the Canopus unit, I removed it and put the 900E on the FW cable, powered up already playing the tape. This didn’t work, as as soon as Capture Now is clicked, FCP still identified it now had a PAL device connected, and aborted the capture.

So I abandoned FCP (and Premiere 6/6.5) and fired up iMovie 2 (probably under OS 9 as this was a while ago, on a dual boot MDD G4). iMovie refused to allow an NTSC project to be set up whilst the 900E was connected, and I had to connect the Canopus ADVC in NTSC mode to get iMovie ready to capture NTSC. Hot switching the FW cable from the Canopus to the powered-up 900E with its NTSC tape playing, then clicking Capture in iMovie resulted in the tape section being captured successfully.
So those early versions of iMovie didn’t have the sophistication to check the identitiy of the FW device attached during capture 🙂

After your capture into iMovie, check this raw captured clip NOT in FCP but in the QuickTime Player. What does the raw captured movie clip look like
viz res and frame size, should be 720×480 if it is really NTSC.
Now extract the video only from QT and import into an NTSC FCP sequence,.
Will the video play unrendered, or does it ask for a render (remember, video only, so FCP doesn’t have to split off the audio from iMovie’s DV stream format) and FCP has to do it’s poor quality format conversion.
Please post your result.”

The resultant DV clip (as seen by QT’s and FCP’s Clip Properties was a standard 720x480x29.97 NTSC DV clip.

Using iMovies scene-detect clip-splitting during capture also worked, but as I was going to use After Effects to standard convert (this was pre the Nattress filter) I wanted one long clip.

I have used this process several times over the years, until I got a DSR-11. The workaround was first described on John Beale’s excellent TRV-900 site – search for Johnson Ching halfway down this long page:
https://www.bealecorner.com/trv900/tips.html

Once converted to 720×576/25fps in an AE comp the resultant clip was fully editable into my PAL FCP project.

(I’ve been editing video on a Mac since 1993 (VideoVisionStudio/Telecast) and DV since 1998 (Fast DV Master), and the one consistent experience over the years is that using an NLE is always about workarounds 🙂 ).

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Sorry to confuse you all so much!
Everything PAL is fine – FCP (PAL setup), TRV-900E PAL for shooting, DSR-20P deck for capture – I’m in the UK.
Deck is PAL only, doesn’t replay NTSC in any form.
So the way I got the NTSC tape digitised with my PAL setup was by using the PAL TRV-900E, but because FCP’s NTSC Easy Setup doesn’t (can’t?) work without a proper NTSC device feeding in the NTSC datastream, I had to use iMovie (which could take the NTSC movie data from a PAL device)….

The original post was about the other way round, how to get a PAL DV tape into an NTSC project, using an NTSV TRV-900.
My method will achieve this, if an early version of iMovie is available.

[Paul Dickin]

[Alexander] “Paul,
Do you know that the Sony TRV900E (a PAL device) can display an NTSC tape’s content
on it’s LCD?
This can be confusing but here’s the kicker, it will only ONLY display, you cannot capture this NTSC media
from this camera.
The TRV900 is qualified for Fire-Wire capture into FCP, but only in it’s native format.
Why use iMovie?”

Hi
Why use iMovie? Because I had (in my case) an NTSC miniDV tape given me by a client for inclusion in a PAL movie, and at that time I had no access to an NTSC camera or deck.
But (here’s the REAL kicker) not only does a TRV-900E PAL display the NTSC in its LCD, and put out a PAL60 picture out of its analogue port, it ALSO puts out the raw digital data stream out of its FW port.

But… FCP (and Premiere 6/6.5) won’t capture this – capture fails before it gets started.
Happily, using the setup procedure in my initial post, early versions of iMovie capture this fime.

Result: I can include the client’s undersea footage (shot by an NTSC camera in the Bahamas) in the sales movie for his yacht in Cannes (where they need PAL DVDs.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
No. Its just a way of capturing DV footage digitally when you haven’t go a proper player of the appropriate standard – the TRV-900 happily passes the digits on the tape down the FW unchanged, so iMovie can capture it, whereupon the Nattress Standard Convertor plug-in can do its stuff 😉

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Reference movies contain the full audio, as well as the video pointer data, so they will come out at around 600MB/hour minimum.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Only the 2 inbuilt SATA drives on a G5 Dual 2GHz (revB) show up when linking to it in Target mode.
The three other SATA drives connected to a Sonnet PCI-X card don’t show up.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
If you are using FCP on a Mac then most external FW400 drives from reputable manufacturers work fine for editing DV from. Problems are most likely to occur when the drives are allowed to spin down or you try to let the Mac sleep. OS X can be set to restrict both of these.
You should have DiskWarrior to hand in the event of the drive not mounting properly.

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Whilst the TRV900 can output to FW in whichever standard the tape was recorded in it also sends information to the computer down the FW identifying which standard camcorder it is – PAL or NTSC. This causes FCP (and most other NLEs) to fail to capture.

However iMovie v1 and v2 have no such qualms (I haven’t tried it with later versions), but they will need to be initialised with a genuine PAL FW device first to allow the correct standard project to be created – I used a switchable Canopus ADVC device, which in your case would be set to PAL mode. Once you have got iMove ready to capture into a PAL project hotswap the FW cable into the 900, press capture and off you go.

The resultant capture will be in dv stream format, but that will work OK in FCP with an audio render.