[Ryan Doyle]

John, what is AE?

[Ryan Doyle]

Hi John,

Thanks for getting back to me.

As far as Nat Geo goes I don’t believe they accept the old tape-based 720p Varicam anymore. They’re totally 1080. Shooting for Nat Geo, cameramen are in a somewhat tough position if they want a variable frame rate camera. They can’t use the Panasonic 2700 because it doesn’t meet their strict standards for megapixel resolution of the camera’s sensors. Only the 3700 does, and that doesn’t do variable frame rates.

For Discovery, as of today they do not accept XDCAMHD for “Gold” standard productions and only as “Silver”… despite what Sony reps at NAB might be saying. I believe this has to do with the compression… something about LongGOP that I’m not going to pretend to understand…

On the slo-mo front, the difference as I understand it with the tape based Varicam is that the camera always records to the tape at 59.94, but uses “frame flagging” when you’re shooting off-speed (IE 32 fps, 45fps, 60fps etc.). You then use the Frame Rate Converter software to extract the flagged frames and get the nice, smooth slo-mo from your files.

The 700 does not use this frame-flagging method and there isn’t a proprietary software from Sony to extract that smooth slow-mo. There might be some other software out there that can do this, but we haven’t found it. As far as our exact methodology goes (what frame rate we ingested at and the sequences we dropped it into) I can’t remember. But I promise, we sat there for hours and tried every different combination of settings we could and just couldn’t get a nice slo-mo image.

I do remember however that what worked the best was using a 29.97/59.94 1080i image from the 700 and slowing that down by 50% or more in our timeline. That looked the smoothest, but still it wasn’t on par quality-wise with what you can get from a real variable frame rate camera.

My best,

Ryan

[Ryan Doyle]

Hi John,

Thank you for your post. I just wanted to add my two cents of knowledge because we went through the whole “should we buy a 700” debacle a couple of months ago:

1. You said, “If for example you want the slomo, just shoot it at 720 60p and transcode into your 1080 24 or 30p timeline.”

-I want to dispell what seems to me like a myth that I’ve heard several times from different cameramen. In my experience, you can not do this. Shooting 60p HD and slowing it down to 24 or 30 will give you some sort of slo-mo, but it’s not that velvety smooth stuff… it just doesn’t look good. I could be wrong… so if you know a way to do it, I’d love to know.

We shot several tests with a PDW700 at 720 60p at our facility and tried transcoding it to 24 and 30. The motion looks nowhere near as good as real slow-mo (IE Varicam, EX-1/3 in-camera slow motion). It looks steppy, interlacey… whatever you want to call it. We tried several different sequence settings, digitizing settings, etc. and it simply will not look like “real” slo-mo.

2. “My advice is not to buy the $4500 24p option and just use the included 720 24p and transcode to 1080 24p on output. ”

– I know for sure that Nat Geo and a few other networks do not accept 720p originated material… This seems to be a growing trend… so this isn’t an option for us at least.

My best,
Ryan