[Paulo Jan]

[Tom Matthies] ” and the FCP systems can but it’s a pain to loose all that quality”

Ah, but here’s the thing. Does it *actually* lose quality? Because, in a side-by-side comparison between the original .m2v and the .mpg, I honestly can’t tell the difference. My impression is that my boss simply had never heard about MPEG Streamclip before and that’s why he distrusted it.

(As for the general point of broadcast stations broadcasting in MPEG2 instead of, say, Betacam… hell, even satellite TV (DVB) uses MPEG-2 now, doesn’t it?).

[Paulo Jan]

It’s for a TV station that we’re working with. From what I understand, they have one of those broadcast server things that use .mpg files, and have asked us to deliver in this format. I did a search here a few weeks ago, and it looked like we weren’t the only ones; there were more people asking about outputting .mpg files, and for the same reason.

[Paulo Jan]

Well, we’re using 8Gb. cards, so DVDs don’t work out for us. Besides, we’re still using FCP 5.0.4, so we have to use P2 Log to convert the data in the P2 cards and export it to XML. Creating DMGs allows us to reuse the card inmediately and still keep an intact image of the data “as it was in the card”.

[Paulo Jan]

Sorry, I should have explained it before. In our workflow, the first thing we do when mounting a P2 card is to make a complete image (DMG) of it with Disk Utility, to keep as a backup. That’s what I meant.

[Paulo Jan]

Thank you. In the end it was just what doka15 said: the manual said to press the “mode” button for 2 seconds or more, and we were just pressing it for 2 seconds. Today we pressed it until the “1394 DEVICE CONNECT” message appeared, and it worked.

Now I have another doubt, however: I tried creating a DMG from the card using Disk Utility, and it created it… but in FAT32 instead of HFS (what I mean is that, when mounting the DMG, the Finder says that the “filesystem” of the virtual disk is FAT32). Why is this? Are the P2 cards formatted in FAT32? Does this make any difference performance-wise? I looked through the Disk Utility options, but didn’t find anything to change the filesystem of the DMGs that it creates.

[Barry Green] “No, that’s not really it. It’s referring to 1080/50i, where each frame gets written to 2 fields of video, and the next frame also gets written to 2 fields (compare that with 2:3 pulldown for NTSC 24P, where each even frame gets written to 2 fields, and each odd frame gets written to three fields).”

Really? But in my manual, every time it talks about 2:2 pulldown is in relation to the 720/25P mode (I should mention that I’m in PAL land). To be exact, it says that 720/25P records using the pulldown, while 720/25PN doesn’t.

[Paulo Jan]

Thanks a lot for your answer. Today we tested it with our camera operator, and it indeed works this way.

Now, this might be off-topic, but just as a curiosity: what problem could there possibly be when importing 2 SD tapes (one progressive, one interlaced) into Avid? The freelance guy I mentioned above complained to us that we had given him a progressive tape and an interlaced one, and that due to that, he had had field dominance problems when importing that had caused delays in his project and blah blah blah. I’ve been thinking about it and, in theory, there shouldn’t be any problem at all: the interlaced tape would be captured correctly and the progressive one too (since it really has 2 fields). The only possible problem that I can see would be if he had set the field dominance wrong in the first place, but the fact that we had given him mixed tapes shouldn’t be a factor either way. Am I right or did I miss something?

[Paulo Jan]

Thanks for your answer. About the first question: as it tends to happen, right after I posted it I found a possible answer in the manual. My copy of it talks about “576i/25P” mode, says that it is activated in the REC FORMAT option of the RECORDING SETUP menu, and explains that it captures progressive images that are converted to 50 fields when outputting and recording. Sounds like it… but it doesn’t say whether this applies to tape or P2 recording.

As for the second: Compressor? I could try, but wouldn’t Compressor just discard one of every 2 frames and end up with a 25fps file at standard speed? And even if it worked, wouldn’t it imply reencoding the DV stream and losing quality? It looks to me that one wouldn’t need to touch the footage itself at all; the only thing necessary would be a program to edit the header of the container file (MXF or QT) to change the frame rate (you don’t change the stream of frames, you just tell the app to play it at half the speed), but my impression is that Compressor will instead recompress everything again.