[Rich Rubasch]

Walter….one more thing….are you certain that the Kona LH doesn’t do this exact same thing the exact same way? I can swear I had the same sequence setting and had to output 1080i 29.97 and I was able to do it….the deck even showed the light for 1080 on the front on output. But the sequence was set to 720 23.98 as was FCP. I just made the change in the Kona control panel and it seemed to do the conversion.

I might be crazy, but this is how it went down. I took the tape to another post house with a 1400 deck and did HDSDI dubs to HDCAM for broadcast and their deck showed the 1080 light on the 1400, so the tape was recorded at 1080. If the LH cannot do this, how did this happen?

Thoughts?

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

5.0 mbps is perfectly fine for video with low motion, especially talking heads or public speakers at corporate shows. I just encoded a long video with 5.0 CBR and it looked exactly the same as the same video at 6.2 mbps. BTW, I would not use a bitrate as high as 7.7 mbps…you are pushing the edge of the bandwidth that might choke some players. I will not exceed 6.4 mbps and have had zero rejections.

I assume you are using AC3 for audio?

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Since I know you like to support the local guy, Top Promotions in Middleton is our local source for promotional items like that and you can actually go right down there and check out the shirt quality before you buy.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

What about the Horita box….this takes the RS422 output of the Kona card or deck and spits out an LTC audio channel. This is how I make timecode matching dubs from HDV to DVCProHD via the Convergent designs M1 box.

I think it is the TG-50. Horita is the timecode conversion/extraction company. Oh, and blackburst generators.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

I went to Michaels and bought those frames for album art and picked a dozen or so albums that I like, old Pink Floyd, Steve Winwood, Donald Fagen, etc. this way I am not stuck with a single piece of art. Every once in a while I can switch them around.

Clients have commented on them and it’s always interesting to say that the album is actually in there!

Works for my suite.

My co-worker bought framed posters from posters.com. Lots of good stuff there too and pretty reasonable.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Might seem so at first glance, but what do we do when we get 720p 23.98 clips form a P2 camera and we have to use it in a 29.97 SD project? Sure would be handy to have that tape for digitizing.

Sure is a pain in the butt to try and convert all those files with compressor etc.

The BluRay option only gives me the same files, with no easy way to get them to 29.97 SD.

Remember, I am not shooting them, and this footage might be used in different projects at different resolutions. I agree it would be great if I called all the shots, from shoot to post. Then I might choose to work at 23.98 720P throughout. Just isn’t the case.

Also, once on tape, I can upload entire parts of the footage into a single clip, instead of managing a bin full of short clips.

Another thing the tape provides….an easy way to get a window timecode dub on DVD…a simple tape to DVD recorder dub and I can have a window dub for the producer. How do you get one of those off your BluRay backup?

I want someone to convince me that shoveling all these files around on hard drives is better than tape…or provides as many solutions. Panasonic seems to have convinced a lot of people out there…I am not one of them…yet.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

I might be unique, but we do projects for other production companies….we are sort of a boutique with special skills. We plug into many different workflows. Hands down I’d rather have a tape than ANY hard drive. I think shooters and production guys are the ones saying “tape is going to be dead” like a broken record. Post guys and gals want a tape.

I have received 720 P footage (which is way less resolution than 1080i) because the shooters only had two 16 gig cards and 1080i “takes up too much space on the cards”. The rest of the project was 1080i on tape from a HDX900.

“Tape is cheap” seems to apply these days over those cards that no one seems to have enough of.

Then, when we get a hard drive from a client with P2 footage, it is usually one of those super cheap USB only deals that have the slowest transfer times ever! Now it’s the post house’s responsibility to transfer that footage all day. Now if I had Firewire 800 drives that’s another thing…

Dan suggested that the P2 card means “instant ingest for editing”..,in my 17 years of experience there is no such thing in this industry as “instant”. Please do not tell your clients on the shoot that this new fangled camera you’re lugging around makes the post process “instant”. We will be upset when you hand us your $89 USB drive with 250 gigs of P2 card footage and the client expects “instant” gratification.

We are still editing an awful lot of SD around these parts. I like both ProRes and DVCPro50 for our SD projects. I prefer a tape to digitize from. I only take what I want, at the resolution I want. If I have a 1080i project and I have 720P tapes, I can let the deck or the KONA card do the conversion to the right format. Doing it on the FCP timeline or in compressor is much less “instant”.

Many people suggest hard drives for back up. Great. But I will guarantee that after you have about a dozen or so hard drives on the shelf you will be back wondering if there is a better way than to keep buying up these hard drives…and how do you catalog all those drives? And should you start charging the client for those drives? A $30 tape is understandable, but now you want to charge me for a $200 hard drive? That might fail? How many posts do you read about failed hard drives? How many for a failed tape? ANY?

I’m feeling like an old fogey writing this, but I trust tape, it is versatile for SD or HD projects and it is cheap.

And please don’t EVER call the P2 workflow “instant”…honestly, it’s just not.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Ok, so I had three hours of 720P footage on a SLOW USB drive from a client. It took nearly 6 hours to log and transfer all the clips. I just double clicked them all and added them to the cue.

Then I strung them out onto 1 hour sequences matching the footage. Since the source timecodes were sequential I set up the start timecode in the sequences and they had continuous unbroken timecode that matched the source clips.

I output the three 1 hour sequences to DVCProHD tape. Took about three hours for the output.

So now I have three one hour tapes with essentially a clone of all the footage with matching timecode. We can delete the material on the hard drive and use it for a new project.

We will use this broll footage now in an SD project (DVCPro50) with some interview footage shot on a Varicam (tape). So having the tape is valuable now to upload just what we need at DVCPro50. Later, these tapes can be valuable as broll in an SD or HD project, and they can be stored with the other original Varicam tapes so the project stays together.

There have been quite a few posts about P2 workflow issues, but for us, getting this footage onto a tape that can be used later as SD or HD without having to warehouse a bunch of hard drives makes a lot of sense. The importing of clips has to be done regardless, so the extra time of basically outputting the footage and the cost of a tape is worth the peace of mind having a tape as a source.

Final thoughts…

I might be unique, but we do projects for other production companies….we are sort of a boutique with special skills. We plug into many different workflows. Hands down I’d rather have a tape than ANY hard drive. I think shooters and production guys are the ones saying “tape is going to be dead” like a broken record. Post guys and gals want a tape.

I have received 720 P footage (which is way less resolution than 1080i) because the shooters only had two 16 gig cards and 1080i “takes up too much space on the cards”. The rest of the project was 1080i on tape from a HDX900.

“Tape is cheap” seems to apply these days over those cards that no one seems to have enough of.

Then, when we get a hard drive from a client with P2 footage, it is usually one of those super cheap USB only deals that have the slowest transfer times ever! Now it’s the post house’s responsibility to transfer that footage all day. Now if I had Firewire 800 drives that’s another thing…

Dan suggested that the P2 card means “instant ingest for editing”..,in my 17 years of experience there is no such thing in this industry as “instant”. Please do not tell your clients on the shoot that this new fangled camera you’re lugging around makes the post process “instant”. We will be upset when you hand us your $89 USB drive with 250 gigs of P2 card footage and the client expects “instant” gratification.

We are still editing an awful lot of SD around these parts. I like both ProRes and DVCPro50 for our SD projects. I prefer a tape to digitize from. I only take what I want, at the resolution I want. If I have a 1080i project and I have 720P tapes, I can let the deck or the KONA card do the conversion to the right format. Doing it on the FCP timeline or in compressor is much less “instant”.

Many people suggest hard drives for back up. Great. But I will guarantee that after you have about a dozen or so hard drives on the shelf you will be back wondering if there is a better way than to keep buying up these hard drives…and how do you catalog all those drives? And should you start charging the client for those drives? A $30 tape is understandable, but now you want to charge me for a $200 hard drive? That might fail? How many posts do you read about failed hard drives? How many for a failed tape? ANY?

I’m feeling like an old fogey writing this, but I trust tape, it is versatile for SD or HD projects and it is cheap.

And please don’t EVER call the P2 workflow “instant”…honestly, it’s just not.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

APM Music online. Great search engine, all online, no contract, buy as you go.

Real instruments, real orchestras, good mix.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Hmmm….recording to animation codec will make a really big file. Unless you record to an external RAID with at least Firewire. If you can get a laptop, or computer with video outputs, I have recorded web casts straight to a DVD recorder or DV deck with simple composite video inputs from the computer. Then I could bring that clip into an editor to get it ready for a DVD.

This is the safest because you are just using the video output of the feed, not actually recording anything to a drive on the computer, or asking SnapZ to keep up for the entire stream.

Just run your video and audio out to a DV deck or DVD recorder.

Safe, easy.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media