[Ramona Howard]

Chris,

Drop me an email and I will pass on the information for a guy over at Clarity.

Cheers,
Ramona at spectsoft dot com

[Ramona Howard]

David,

What products have you tried?

Try taking a look at our product RaveHD.

Don’t want to come off strong BUT this is what we do, and have been doing for many years. We have begun putting stuff up on the site announcing and detailing our 2.0 release that will blow your socks off. This has been the release we have been working on since our early days on Troopers 2. Cool stuff like Audio and TC in the DPX header and everything is passed via a simple little protocal called XML and where else do you know of a product that you get the source code?

https://spectsoft.com/wiki/Website/HomePage

Best of luck,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Jandro,

I would like to add that if your looking at doing mainly 4:4:4 then I would have to recommend AJA. Everything under that is really just a toss up, that is except for the up/down convert and the infamous jitter test….

AJA provided the board for some of the first 4:4:4 projects and is still rolling them out. I have yet to read of a huge project like Sin City done using a Decklink. The decklink products work well but the AJA products work amazingly well. Well worth the extra few dollars.

Like Bob and Walter said if your stepping into the 4:4:4 world then the 1,000 you save on the board won’t get you as far as you think. I agree hard drives are inexpensive but there is a heck of allot more to it other than the drives.

Here is a link to our projects page in which both Sin City and Shark Boy were full 4:4:4 projects
https://spectsoft.com/wiki/Website/Projects

Best of luck and if I can be of assistance don’t hesitate to yell.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Big Badda Boom
Bobs Way or the highway!

There could be cool things like if you try to run without BB your deck spits out the tape without the cassett and then explodes leaving the tape jockey to say damn should have listened to Bob!

Sorry Bob, but this could be fun….

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

I second that…could be far more entertaining than the road rage games out today.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Just wanted to add in here.

RaveHD has always handled the flagged frames. It was one of the first real features we added for Troopers 2, 2+ years ago.

A bit off topic here but all relative to the discussion….I would like to give you guys a sneak at our new release. This release has many cool features and we have been in hibernation for about three months working on it, although it has been a work in progress for about two years. Our customer base has been by our side during this with many others that knew about it hanging in the wings just counting the days…..first release is scheduled the end of the week. One big feature is that we are natively supporting 8 channels of audio in the DPX header. For both capture and playout. This is one of the coolest features from the guys in the back this year and opens up a huge possibility for not only downconverting but so many other things.

We need to confirm this with all of the software out there but if AE, Shake, Graphics Magic and many other packages support DPX the correct way this will allow us to take an HD DPX with embedded audio(that is embedded in the header) and with a script run a downconvert that will maintain header info. This eliminates both timecode and audio sync problems in addition to needing no additional hardware. This can run on the RaveHD box in the background if need be and given hardware is fast enough(which it is now, 2 years ago it was not) we can provide both an HD and SD frame/s with the exact information on the fly. I would like to add that Graphics magic is an Open source product(free) that is very good and if it doesn’t support the DPX correctly, IT WILL. We are in for some exciting times. Watch for 2.0 to be released later this week and I am working on some audio files that give an overview of the RaveHD modules that should get posted at the same time. Remember we can take these frames and also wrap them into Quicktimes and visa versa.

These three months of lots of caffeine, no sleep and no life have been exciting to say the least. We look forward to sharing it with the cow, See you guys in the pasture!

Cheers,
Ramona

Gary: It’s on the list….

[Ramona Howard]

That term sounds so cool and you would think it would be information easily available. You try hunting for it.

Mine is office b*#@&. Not that I’m on the air everyday, only once.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Gary,

I agree with Bob on this one. You can get accurate RS422 on any cable length. Now other hardware can effect it or crappy wire or connections but not length. Hell we can do RS422 over a standard network protocal and get accuracy and we all know how long network cable goes.

As far if this issue is due to hardware or FCP, I doubt that it’s the hardware, we don’t have this problem. Now the problems that do exist are the deck ballistics and the offsets that one must account for, those are very real…..

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

There are 12 port cards(haven’t checked out the latest RocketRaid), I’m not sure if all will work with the Mac. The newest 3ware boards are quite impressive. 8 port boards gives us more than double the thruput of what we were getting a short two months ago.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Sean,

I agree on all points and yes picture quality is very important, it’s what we do.

It is possible to capture without 2:3 or any cadence for that matter, capture just the flagged frames from Varicam and add cadence back in on playout but it sounds like your project is well beyond any of that. Ouch Sounds like the project from hell.

Good luck and you may want to drink lots of Caffeine,

Cheers,
Ramona