[Robert]

Hi Chris –

Often times people will set up an F900 to intentionally look “low contrast” and desaturated. This approach is about capturing all information in the highlight and shadow areas with the intention of color correcting it in post. You can often decide to clip whites or blacks in post production with good results if you have captured images carefully. Video cams have limited dynamic range and obviously don’t handle highlight information so good, but many of them can capture a lot of black information. Highlight clipping is mostly unrecoverable information, but blacks can usually be controlled (within reason) during color grading.

Often when a high contrast lighting situation is encountered, operators will expose for the highlight (IOW, to retain all the highlight detail and not let it clip), but then their shadow detail could be lost. If they want the shadow detail but cannot fill it with light, they will often stretch the blacks using black gamma or master ped. It can get overdone however, resulting in a “milky” picture, so it’s best to have a qualified tech (DIT) do this sort of thing. Is this what your stuff looks like? What was the content? Was it a controlled lighting situation (i.e. studio) or was it daylight exteriors? Was it a rental camera (some houses will preset their camera with a “lowcon” look for information capture)?

In any event, hope your material is salvagable. Having a good onset D.I.T. (working closely with the DP) can help facilitate smart decision making when it comes to timing the camera, so they are often useful to have on your video crew!

Hope this helps, and good luck!

[Robert]

Also of note is that there are already FW800/express port adaptors being made for the 15″ Macbook Pro:

https://www.siig.com/

[Robert]

I’m running FCP 5.1, but unless I am missing something, I don’t see any sequence preset for DVCPRO 1080/24p.

[Robert]

Hi Jan…just wondering…

Does FCP 5.x reinsert the user bit flagged frame data when you lay back to the HVX or 1200A via firewire yet?

This used to be a big problem for me as it would not allow you to turn around and play the layed off tape back at 1080/24p in the 1200 deck. However, I have not worked with the format in a long time.

thanks for the info,

Rob

[Robert]

he reason for this is that the DVCPro cameras record a flag data stream on tape along with the picture/sound. It is carried via firewire connection only, so SDI data doesn’t “see” the flags on tape. FCP cannot “see” the flags otherwise and can’t distinguish between pd and regular frames.

Actually, this is not entirely true.

The flagged frame data does get encoded into the SDI stream. It gets embedded in the ancillary data space as user bits in the RP-188 timecode.

I don’t have the I/O, but I have the Kona2 and have worked with the Decklink Pro, and in both instances I could remove pulldown from SD and HD sources when digitizing from an SDI stream.

Check out this excerpt from the AJA Kona2 FAQ:

The KONA 2 board and drivers will handle VariCam duplicate frame removal during capture via the KONA 2 board’s uncompressed HD-SDI input for any “shooting” frame rate (it skips over any extra frames). However, Final Cut Pro can only capture video at the standard video frame rates as determined in the Capture Preset Editor dialog: 60, 59.94, 30. 29.97, 25, 24, 23.98, and 15 fps. So, for example, if you want to shoot and edit your movie at 12 fps, VariCam could capture it, and KONA 2 could digitize it, but you wouldn’t have a way to get FCP to make 12 fps clips or sequences.

When your “shooting” frame rate is the same as your “playback” frame rate, you can use the KONA 2 Easy Setup that matches. For example, if you are shooting at 23.98 fps and your intent is to capture/edit/playback the clip at 23.98 fps, then you can use the “AJA Kona2: 720p 23.98 Varicam” or “AJA Kona2: 720p 23.98 DVCProHD Varicam” Easy Setups and the card will automatically skip the duplicate VariCam frames and ONLY capture the 23.98 active frames/sec. Use the “… Varicam” setup if you want to capture Uncompressed 8-bit clips, and use the “… DVCProHD Varicam” setup if you want to capture DVCProHD compressed clips.

If you are deliberately over/under cranking the shooting rate in order to get a slow/fast motion effect (for example: shooting a clip at 48 fps with the intent to play it back at 1/2 speed in a 24 fps sequence), then you should use the “AJA Kona2: 720p 59.94 DVCProHD” Easy Setup to capture ALL of the frames (active + duplicates) – then process the resulting clip using the software Frame Rate Converter with a target frame rate of 23.98. The KONA 2 board extracts the VariCam flags from the RP-188 stream during capture and inserts them into the captured DVCProHD stream where the FRC can find them. Note that this ONLY works if you are capturing using DVCProHD compression. The KONA 2 board doesn’t do the slow/fast motion processing – this can only be done by the Frame Rate Converter using the VariCam flag bits inside the DVCProHD-compressed clips.

Question: How can I capture DVCProHD clips from a VTR and use the software Frame Rate Converter?

Answer: The software Frame Rate Converter works on DVCProHD clips that have the embedded VariCam flags (these are the flags that identify the “shooting” rate of the clip, and which frames are duplicates). You can capture DVCProHD clips from a VTR in two ways: via FireWire (which transfers the clips in their compressed DVCProHD format – and retains the embedded VariCam flags); or by connecting the HD-SDI output of the VTR to the KONA 2 input and capturing it as you would any other video clip. During playback, the Panasonic VTRs take the VariCam flags out of the compressed video and add them to the HD-SDI video stream as “RP188 Ancillary Data”. The KONA 2 hardware/software picks off the Ancillary Data while it is capturing and adds the VariCam flags back into the compressed DVCProHD clip where the FRC can find it.

There are two caveats to observe: for the KONA 2 solution you must be capturing using the DVCProHD codec (the FRC only works with DVCProHD compressed clips); and you must use the “AJA Kona2: 720p 59.94 DVCPro HD” capture preset (or the “AJA Kona2- 720p 59.94 DVCPro HD” Easy Setup). This setup tells the KONA 2 card to capture all frames (active + duplicates) so the FRC can use them. Although it sounds counterintuitive, the KONA 2 setups with “VariCam” in the name tell the board to automatically skip over any duplicate VariCam frames and only capture the active frames – which is only what you want to use if your shooting frame rate and editing/playback frame rate match (in which case you don’t need the FRC!).

I don’t know if this stuff applies to the i/o card, but in any event if you have aquired in any Panasonic 24p format (including the DVX-100), you should be able to ingest the material with pull down and then apply a reverse telecine (pull down removal) in cinema tools or FCP. The only time I have had a problem is when the proper cadence can’t be detected. I had this problem when trying to digitize DV via firewire from a Sony JH3 HDCAM vtr (which, incidently, does not play nice with firewire/FCP at all in my experience). The fix was do run the SD SDI thru a DPS frame sync to reclock the signal, and then digitize from the SDI stream. Then, a reverse telecine was performed in Cinema tools, if I remember correctly. The application was offline 24p editing for an HDCAM 24p feature.

Hope this is helpful,

Rob

[Robert]

Yes….an interesting camera, but the cost of the P2 workflow may be prohibitive.

At NAB they did not show a working camera…just one encased in glass (leaving one to speculate that the product is not ready for market). It holds two P2 cards which, at 8Gb, are approx. $2000 each. At 720/24p, this should be around 15 minutes total record time. This means that you will have to buy the P2 hard drive to offload the cards during shooting (they are hot swappable) to the drive and then rerecord over the cards (for DV, there is an onboard DV vtr). The P2 is also approx. $2000. That makes the whole kit and kaboodle about a 10k investment.

What I like about the cam? The ability to choose DVCPRO25, 50, or HD is very nice. Also, it is supposed to support variable frame rate (in HD) from 4-60fps. And lastly, recording as data means that your record time is directly related to the frame rate and resolution…no more copied frames to accomadate a 720/60p vtr. And since the codecs are exactly the same, you needn’t worry about post…it’s still DVCPRO.

What I don’t like? Other than the obviously price problems, the camera still retains the crappy, undetachable lens with endlessly spinning ring that the DVX has (something JVC actually got right on their ProHD…worth a look, too). I don’t see any Post houses or rental houses getting equipped with P2, so purchasing what you need to handle the entire workflow is going to be a must.

It’s great technology for ENG or owner/operators…just need the prices to come down.

Regards,

Robert A. Strait
Plus 8 Digital NYC