Ron Shook
Forum Replies Created
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Marisu,
[marisu fronc] “For your purposes I’d probably duplicate each clip and designate one as “right” and one as “left” – apply the filter to copy the appropriate channel and take it from there. Again, this isn’t elegant, and is most certainly a workaround, however it’s a pretty basic one.”
So you have two identical clips where one is stereo mono from the left channel and the other from the right channel. What is the procedure to “take it from there,” so that you have a single video track with two stereo audio tracks that are locked and loaded and synced so that you can treat them as a single clip, manipulate any combination of the 3 tracks without losing sync, and does this workaround mean that you have significantly degraded the functionality of PPro in terms of its real-time feature set when you use this combo clip for basic editing procedures? I don’t need the long story here, just what the workflow is and how its results affect functionality. I’m looking to see whether there is a workflow that would allow me to function with this problem by throwing more cheap disk space at it, i.e., capture complete tapes or portions of tapes, fix the audio on the long clips for later chopping into sub-clips and editing?
I hope that communicates a little. (g)
Ron Shook
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Oh, Herb & Michael,
[Herb Sevush] “You’ve totally ignored the previous posting by Michael Webb, but I would suggest that if you had a shoot where you had 1 camera with different mikes assigned to tracks 1 and 2, and where you needed to use 1 or 2 at various times, but not both together (this situation comes up all the time in documentary shoots) you would be hard pressed to find an NLE that is slower than your beloved speed demon.”
Say it ain’t so. I’ve seen a number of things about PPro that I wouldn’t be happy with until fixed but I could live with until they are, but this audio thing takes the cake. The situation is endemic to just about any shoot, and if it doesn’t get fixed PPro is off the table for me. I simply couldn’t live with it. Incredible!
Ron Shook
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Jeremy,
[JeremyG] “Hmm, that iomega product seems to be the best solution I’ve seen yet.”
Yes, Ivan has obviously been looking at the GrassValley Infinity like I have, but I didn’t make the connection between what it uses and a way to deal with the transportability and backup problems that I have with the HVX200 P2 cost and workflow. This might do the trick.
BTW, I don’t think we’d have to wait for Rev Pro. I’m pretty sure that standard Rev which is already out has the same capacity and speed as Rev Pro. Rev Pro has some onboard browser and editing software and extra armoring of the cartridge. Standard Rev 1394 drives can be purchased in the US for just a little more than $250 and the Cartridges are about $40 each in packs of 4, not much more than DVCPro100HD tape.
Ron Shook
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Charlie,
[charles] “I have used a laptop computer placed below the camera.”
It must be above the camera lens, because the look down doesn’t work. If the subject is looking up and not too near the camera lens, it’s impossible to tell that he/she isn’t looking directly into the lens, but it’s quite possible to tell if the laptop is below the lens and looks a bit shifty besides.
Ron Shook
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Steven,
Recently a PA dropped my 9″ Sony production monitor and destroyed it. I was sick of lugging the danged thing around anyhow, and decided to get an LCD monitor to replace it. Have a look at what I found:
https://www.ikancorp.com/pt1000.htm
Like any LCD, it’s not a critical monitor, but it’s pretty darned good and sharp, and with a laptop, you’ve always got a prompter in your kit, as well as a production monitor, on-camera monitor, or even a second 800×600 VGA screen for your laptop, and everything you need to do this comes with the kit (except the proper mounting hardware for a pro camera which can be purchased for $10 to adapt it). I picked it up with a $25 sunscreen and shipping for under $700.
Ron Shook
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Barry,
[Barry Green] “No need to jury-rig anything. The camera has a USB2 port on it. You can plug an external hard disk right into the camera and have the camera dub the contents of the P2 cards right onto the hard disk, at faster-than-realtime speeds.”
You must have some very specialized productions that’ll allow you to shoot for 8 or 16 minutes and then stand around for a nearly like amount of time while you use the camera to purge the cards for the next few minutes of shooting? Because what you say is possible doesn’t mean that it’s usable in the real world, not even if the cards were 32 or 64 gig. 90 percent of production would demand an external station to off load 1 card while the other is recording, whether this station is jury-rigged or not.
[Barry Green] “Sure it does. Ask your client this — which would they rather receive at the end of the day — a box of tapes that they’ll have to then sort through, log, and digitize (assuming they have the right kind of deck, otherwise they may have to go and rent a deck)… or… hand them an off-the-shelf external hard disk that already has all the clips on it, ready to edit?
That’s the no-brainer of the decade. They’ll take the hard drive in an instant, and slash their postproduction time and costs dramatically. No logging, no digitizing, no deck rental, just immediate editing.”
Sounds great on the surface, enough to intrigue me. When I add up the costs, I’m less intrigued. It means having an AC power source near to the production, an extra crew member, who can’t be a dumb mule, to do the dump to disk and slep cards back and forth, and a second dump to backup disk, because there are just too many things that can go wrong in this scenario, and I wouldn’t want to depend on just one hard disk copy of the cards. I’m a PC guy, so I don’t know this for certain, but wouldn’t you need to have 2 dumping stations and operating systems to service both FCP and PC clients? Kinda starting to sound more like a nightmare than a no-brainer as far as the production workflow is concerned.
Dang!
Ron Shook
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Jan,
You don’t believe in “yes” or “no” or “maybe,” do you? (g)
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “If you want to adopt this camera, you must first learn how to embrace IT”
You’re preachin’ to the choir, here. I hope that those not in the choir study through this succinct mini tutorial on IT from the Panasonic perspective.
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “>I can’t give them $2k memory cards or hard drive units, or even $200 memory cards which despite the best of intentions I’ll never get back.
And I would not expect you to. You need to think of other alternatives.
>I suspect that it’s going to be a very long, long time before memory card technology will allow for that…
Frankly a quick look around the industry shows that there are plenty of Hard drives available for storage. It isn’t like we don’t know how much storage is required. In HD it is about 1 minute a gig. Hard drives have become down right cheap. Now I am not saying that this works in all cases but frankly some derivation might work in many. Most of the shoots that I have been on have some form of electricity, and therefore a transfer station can be set up. What is handed to the client at the end of the day is the data in a drive, and a back up drive. The back up drive could be a DLT which is cheaper yet, but there is security in having back ups.”
Hard drives or DLT can be made to work and work well as long as the production/post-production chain is in one pocket, but none of these alternatives are broad based enough in the industry to work when the chain is in multiple pockets, and I don’t see Panasonic addressing this aggressively…Yet. More about this later.
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “Drives are cheap and the data does move quickly, in most cases 4X real time,”
Sure, hard drives are cheap, and I could, relatively inexpensively, jury rig something together for myself to back up P2 cards on location, I guess (I’m none too sure about reading these cards and what it takes?) But… that doesn’t help me in my quandary about how to service clients that need to walk away with easily transportable media. DLT might be fine for my longer term archiving, but to ask a client to invest over $2k in linear media handling in this day and age is impossible.
Where is the value to my problem in the AJ-PCS060G Portable DVCPRO
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Brian,
[Brian SaenzDeViteri] “you could dump all the media onto a regular external hard drive, but that will require copying files after a shoot, maybe not as quick as your clients want it?”
Neither the formal Pana solution or the informal roll your own solution are nearly fast enough for a very high percentage of my clients. I’m actually encouraged that, other than the fact that Jan is in the middle of a show right now, she did not respond to this probe. Perhaps my need is being met but it’s far too sensitive for her to even wink at. (g)
Ron Shook
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Jiri,
[jiri vrozina] “What is Your oppinion on Infinity??”
I don’t expect to live long enough to find out. (g)
Seriously, it might prove to be great, but North America hasn’t much of a support network that I’m aware of and Thompson has no name here. Grass Valley does, but not for cameras. It’d be a very hard row to hoe.
[jiri vrozina] “nosogoodlookinganymore”
wouldbereferencetomeoryou?
Ron
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Jan,
As an addendum to my previous response to this post:
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “Take the zero defect statement above, add to that the knowledge that it is under 1% of all quantities available. Add to that, the card is constucted like a small army tank, able to withstand 17Gs of gravitational force. On top of that add the LSI and various other components. Add to that that the transfer speed of the individual cards, 20MBps, has a potential of 640Mbps when set up as an array, and at this point in time nothing else in the chain can match the speed, but the card is ready for when the rest of the chain catches up. There is future built into the design.”
Does the future built into the design of this technology allow for the possibility that there would be multiple tiers of memory cards delivered by Panasonic as the cost of solid state memory drops?
To clarify what I mean, let me set up a future hypothetical that I’m sure is far from just around the corner. Let’s assume that 2 years from now the solid state industry is delivering 64 gig solid state memory card technology which would allow for about about 2 hrs of DVCProHD shooting using the two slots on the HVX200 (my numbers may not be real accurate here but that’s not the point.) Might we have that tank like technology you talk about above for $1k/64gig cards for repeated production use, perhaps a mid-range $500 card for post-production use that needs to be near as perfect electronically but not as robust physically, and a more throw away card for $100 to handle gently and hand to the client, that only promises that 60 gigs of the 64 gig card are usable. The exact hypothetical numbers aren’t important here, just the concept.
Panasonic sort of pioneered this concept in the digital tape world with DVCPro tape. DVCPro tape is so much more robust (and much more expensive) than run of the mill DV25 tape that it isn’t funny. I’ve got a friend in another state who has reused his DVCPro tape for production up to 20 times without ever a problem, something that you could never hope to do or consider doing with DV25 or DVCam tape from any manufacturer.
Ron Shook