Sean Meredith
Forum Replies Created
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One other note. You must be recording to tape for the Varicam to flag frames. If you set the camera to 23.98 or any other rate, it won’t flag the frames unless tape is recording and flagging those same frames. Safest to hear your A.C. say “speed” before you hit “Capture Now”.
-sean
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If you’re able to solve the slo-mo issue that Chris brings up, then it’s totally possible. This summer, I captured a whole feature shoot from a Varicam to my G5 via SDI. I had my SATA RAID 0 in gangs of four. Beware about thinking you have tape back-up, because FCP can’t pull timecode from the SDI. Every clip will start at 00:00. I used a Decklink. The Decklink is able to deal with flagged frames for 23.98. I guess slo-mo is another issue.
good luck,
sean -
Oliver,
I saw your post about Algolith. Have you used to for uprezzing? Any impressions you could relate?Sean Meredith
Director
“Dante’s Inferno”
http://www.dantefilm.com -
Sean,
Could you tell me a little about your experiences with Algolith? I’m interested in using it to upconvert my 720p master to a 1080p master. Have you done anything like that with it? I saw your comment about an hour per second of video for converting 1080i60 to 1080p24, which is scaring me off.Sean Meredith
Director
“Dante’s Inferno”
http://www.dantefilm.com -
Funny that no one replied to this. I’m wondering the same thing.
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a little late, but I just did a test and it seemed to work fine for me. i’m using 720p23.98 10bit uncompressed. I’ve been trolling thru the post about the media manager trying to find out if it’s reliable in FCP5. I’ve had problems with it in every FCP version.
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great, I just ordered an upgrade to 6.5 today.
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Yes, I’m viewing full res through my Decklink system (HD Pro card -> HDLink -> Apple 20″ Cinema).
Duh, I just discovered the problem. Frame blending had been on by default. Funny that it kicks in even when the speed hasn’t changed. Now it looks sharp.
Sorry to waste your time. thanks, Graeme.
-sean
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“That is not correct, it is FCP that does not read the TC over HDSDI / SDI it has nothing to do with the cards. ”
Are there other editing programs that can get the TC out of the HDSDI? I had heard people talking about this issue before and they had said it was an issue with the cards and that Aja and BlackMagic were having trouble with it. But that’s only what I heard.
Do you mean it converts the BNC TC to RS-422? I looked at the Addenda product page, but couldn’t figure out which product would do the job. I wish I had known about it before my shoot. I spoke with 2 camera technicians, an A.C., and a D.I.T., and none of them had a working solution. Luckily, we won’t be needing to go back to the tapes.
Sean Meredith
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Matt, I directed a feature this summer shot with the Varicam. We captured directly to from the HD-SDI to RAID drives through a DeckLink HD Pro (single channel) card. We captured at the same quality as the camera 10bit uncompressed using the apple codec. The rate was about 58MB/sec. Each RAID array was made up of four 400GB Seagate SATA drives formatted with SoftRAID. The capturing went off without a hitch for two weeks. It was great. The timecode issue was one that I was unable to solve. The current HD cards can’t read the embedded timecode. There is BNC timecode out of the Varicam, but it needs to be RS-422. I did find a BNC to RS232 converter but not one that converts to rs422. We did record to tape as a SECOND back-up. Our main back-up was another RAID set that we backed up to every night. The would put us in a pickle if we needed to use those tapes since the TC doesn’t match. Be sure to have the person capturing video pay close attention to any hits or noise. Besides having the great depth of 10bit color and the full resolution of 1280 lines across (instead of the downsampled 960lines), the great convenience is not having to rent a deck and spend a week capturing video. I am very happy with the codec’s quality. The FCP system dropped out unflagged frames and captured at 23.98 with ease. Remember the 23.98 that’s coming out of the SDI isn’t a 3:2 pulldown. It’s 23.98 progressive frames per second with duplicate frames written in that aren’t flagged. We had no problems with the system knowing which frames to capture and which frames to throw away.
I decided to attempt this whole thing when I realized that the Varicam recorded to tape downsampled to 960 lines across instead of the full 1280. My DP thought it was an interesting approach but didn’t think a lot about it. But when we were on the set and doing playbacks (which is another great convenience) he was very impressed with the picture quality. Unless you really have a reason for 24p, make sure you record and capture 23.98p which sets up a good workflow to 29.97 interlaced masters.
Sean Meredith
Director
“Dante’s Inferno”