[Sam Lee]

I charge clients 15% more for anything with AVCHD. It’s a pain in the $%@@$. Yes, I edit in FCP X and you can edit natively with AVCHD. But good luck trying to relink and do any future revisions with it. Metadata on clip names are horrible. It’s virtually impossible to relink dozen of folders with the generic “Clip 1…” cam. I spent more times in figuring out how to relink and update than edit the whole show with it. It is just not a format for serious pro to use. My only easy solution is to export it to an AVC-I 100 MXF with Premiere CC for Mac or Windows format and it’s a pleasure to work in FCP X.

[Sam Lee]

I think these batts are to be disposed or recycled.

I worked with many TV stations in the past and have personally witnessed with the utter neglect and abuse of the batts. Instead of the 4-6 years useable service life for Hytron 140s, you will get lucky if it can last over 2.5 years when used in the TV station environment.

My Hytron 140s are going strong even after 4 years of use (read and follow the instructions fr AB and you’ll get 4+ years) of beyond the typical 2-3 years on all batts.

[Sam Lee]

Be very cautious of USB3 (or whatever bus you’re using) that it’ll get saturated and the file i/o will be too much too handle for the computer and hdd. You may get corrupted i/o but the OS will not report it. Shot Put Pro will solve this but it’s too slow when dealing with more than 3 simultaneous cards. SDHC cards are so cheap now that you can probably have no need to offload in the field.

[Sam Lee]

With those unfavorable parameters for the cheap $200 recorders, I had a chance to take a closer look at my good old Sound Devices 702T. It’s actually pretty small when taken out of the bag and stripped off all of the data i/o. Much lighter than an Anton Bauer Hytron 140 battery. I’ll have 100% accurate sound recording.

I’ve edited films where the sound recordist recorded at 29.97NDF and the cam was at 23.98PN. It’s a nightmare after 4 minutes into the long take. A pound more of weight in the field will be a sacrifice for the post. Boy it’ll make hiking up hill a bit harder than 1/4 lbs with the pocket recorder. Talk about out of physical shape. Most in good physical shape folks would laugh at this!

[Sam Lee]

Here in Los Angeles, many station owners are bidding as high as half a billion dollars for their spectrum in the UHF frequencies. The outlook for free to air 4K looks bleak as it’s making room for 5G wireless. I think we’ll see 720p and 1080i for a very long, long time. I do lots of live events and those 2/3″ cams with fiber triax and CCUs (Sony, Ikegamis) are always preferred over 4K due to their lack of availability and super high costs. That’ll gradually change but for the mean time, you can really milk out 1080i/p gear for a while. Not forever but a decent period of time until the next standard will be 4K or whatever the format the community likes.

If I have the funds to own 4K freq block, I’d want to split it to eight 480i, 4 1080i channels. Imagine the cash revenue and jobs created vs broadcasting in 4K on a single channel.

[Sam Lee]

For 8K to really take off and be an accepted standards, pretty much the entire workflow chain (cam lens, cam, storage, transmission) has to be also affordable. So far I think a 8K rated lens will be well over $150K. Storage wise at least a 16 Tb single SATA hdd, LTO-8 that can archive at least 15 Tb natively and it has to all be costing the same amount as today’s 8 Tb hdd. That will take at least a decade or more. I think 8K is for a very small, high end niche market.

I’m not even in any hurry to jump into 4K at all. There’s just not a huge demand for it. What’s laughable is the mass public couldn’t care less. I’m still getting 90% DVD burn requests. That’s right. 480i/p DVD in 2016. No Blu Ray!! Most people I know still like to view it on their smart phone and small tablets at 720p. So that just tell you 4K has a very low return of investment for many situations.

I think 4K will be ripe to getting to by 2017-2018. Biggest problem on current 4K cams is the lack of a super telephoto lens. Canon has the 75-300mm. 300mm on PL 4K is unbelievably heavy and bulky to transport. It just doesn’t have that reach. This is when 4K 2/3″ ENG camcorders will be out. Then the whole 4K ecosystem will be complete. One can at least use the 101x box lens with an incredible stabilized super telephoto coverage in full 4K. A must have for large venue and wildlife coverage.

[Sam Lee]

If you have a iron clad business model and you can fully finance 4K workflow, go for it. However I will bet your investment in 4K now will have very little return of investment. To me it’s an optional luxury now if you have the cash flow.

If I were you, I’d wait for this 4K fad to pass and get into 8K soon. 1080p is just fine for many years go come.

[Sam Lee]

The only permanent workaround in dealing with AVCHD media is to rewrap it to a container .MOV. Rewrapping can easily be done with FCP7’s log and transfer. But this method defeats the purpose of native AVCHD editing but it works very well for me. If the source is moved to a different location, I can do a global relink instead of painstakingly go to every clip and do it. It costs a bit more time but current ver of FCP X seems to support rewrapped media better than native cam media.

Same thing goes for native P2 format as well. For some odd reasons beyond my understanding, native format editing support has not fully matured in FCP X. It needs lots of improvements ahead.

[Sam Lee]

The source format is Apple AVC-I 100 rewrapped as .MOV@1080-2997p. For some odd reasons, I can’t get rid of the audio. It always stuck even I explicitly specified Video only on the Master File export.

[Sam Lee]

Nothing lasts forever. All Mac Pros will eventually die out. I have two of the PSU died out on me last several months. Cost for a new PSU is about $300. I don’t think it’s a worthwhile replacement because for starter the h.264/mp4 encoding is about 10x slower than any of the newer i5 or i7 Macs. The power consumption is 300-500 W vs 90 for Mac Mini and MB Pro. Over a six month period you’ll be wasting about $400-500 in power bill vs $150 for the 90W. Looking at the big picture, it’s time to get a new Mac (anything w/ i series CPU) with lower power consumption and faster performance.