Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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I’d like to know as well. I’ve tried a 30ft cable by itself with no luck.
I use Gefen FW extenders. You attach it to the end of a 15ft cable, and then you can daisy chain 33ft cables up to 250ft (it has a booster to allow 33ft cables to work). Messy but it works.
Sean
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The newest plasmas supposedly are very resistant to burn-in. Even without a wobble function.
Sean
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This is great news.
Sean
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I tried Premiere Pro 1.0 when it came out. I even cut a trailer on it start to finish within the 30 day trial period.
I thought the RT performance was incredible. But it was really buggy and unstable.
Regardless, I’d never tell a client or potential client that I cut on Adobe Premiere. It just sounds really bad. Hard enough convincing people FCP is on par with Avid.
Sean
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[walter biscardi] “Have you actually done this test Sean? We’ve done this test many many times, especially when we were first establishing the DVCPro HD workflow. I’m not arguing that there is some loss in this method”
Remember, I have done the EXACT workflow as you on several occasions. I found it totally acceptable considering the circumstances of those particular projects. My only point is that it is not “the best” and what you see is not always what you get by the time it reaches the viewer. The “zooming in with scopes” standard isn’t always trivial. My monitor is 19″. If the show was going on a 30 ft projection screen, zooming in might not be such a bad idea. That’s just how I feel about it and there’s nothing wrong with those who disagree. Both ways provide an incredible picture that is many times better than HDV and SD no matter if you recompress it once, twice, or three times. And if you do well-lit television shows, then the effects of compression are far less damaging. The only times I’ve worked with DVCProHD is for live music concert projects. These are not brightly lit and are much, much more susceptible to compression artifacts verses a well-lit TV studio set like your show Good Eats.
[walter biscardi] “Actually with the Kona boards, you are capturing the same as if you were coming in via Firewire however AJA says the image quality is slightly better because of how they treat the codec on the way in. Don’t know all the technical engineering of this, but we’re actually going to switch to the SDI input this week as that allows us to feed our 1200A to three different suites via SDI.”
I hate to rehash old arguments, but I think they’re full of it. I’m sorry. I’m sure it still looks very, very good. And I understand that wiring each room for FW can be impractical (although it can be done with Gefen extenders). SDI-only wiring provides great benefits as it makes everything easy to patch and distribute to multiple destinations. So go for it. I can totally understand why it’s worth doing. But it is not native and it certainly isn’t “better” in the sense that detail which never existed on the tape is somehow added. The only thing added is a 2nd round of compression which is a lossy hit (albeit not visual at first). But not only that, the process itself actually upscales the image from 970×720 to 1280×720 as it is converted to an uncompressed SDI signal inside the deck. Then on the other end it downscales it back to 970×720 as the Kona converts it back to DVCProHD – causing real loss.
Take this analogy. You have 1 cup of vodka. Add two teaspoons of water to it. Mix it up. Now remove 2 teaspoons of liquid from the glass. You still have 1 cup of vodka left over. But it’s slightly diluted. It’s not like you have a magic teaspoon that only removes water from the mixture and leaves the vodka in the glass. Even the greatest vodka tasters in the world might not be able to pass the Pepsi challenge. But it doesn’t change the fact that the original glass was more pure than the one that had water mixed in.
If AJA has some special magic trick, I’d love to read about it. But all I’ve heard are ambiguous and anecdotal statements. Anyone, please feel free to prove me wrong.
I do understand why AJA would claim this. They figure it still looks great (and I’m sure it does) so why complicate things and tell “simple-minded Mac editors” that the Kona cards are not the ideal tool to capture DVCProHD footage. If we did that, some DVCProHD exclusive shops may feel they don’t need to buy one (which they don’t except for monitoring). I hope I’m wrong, but I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest otherwise. Not on the AJA website, not on the Cow, not on any FCP user groups, boards, blogs, Google search – nothing even mentions the topic let alone explains it.
Again, I’m not trying to criticize your workflow or anything like that. Believe me. I’m sure you provide better looking video to your clients than most shops would. I just think it’s important people understand these concepts so they are better equipped to make their own decisions.
Sean
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[walter biscardi] “Because I consider it a waste to capture DVCPro HD at anything higher than it’s native format. I can’t “add quality” to what has been recorded on tape, that’s just not possible.”
Nobody’s arguing that. As long as you capture FW, you’re right – you can’t add to the quality. I was saying that footage which you’ve applied effects, filters and CC must be rendered on an UC timeline ONLY IF you MUST have the absolute cleanest video image possible (which is overkill for many). Do this and there is no benefit to capturing UC vs. FW native.
[walter biscardi] “I just feel I have to step in here for a moment. To say “if someone can’t afford the disk requirements for uncompressed finishing workflow then I would hardly worry about it” does not apply in our case.”
Actually it could. Maybe saying “Can’t afford” was a bad way to phrase it. Rendering to uncompressed means more time rendering, more disk space, and requires space on a fast array when it isn’t if you do all DVCProHD. It also means you have to go back and resize all graphics to reflect 1280×720 vs. the DVCProHD ratio of 970×720. This means more time which means more money- either out of your pocket or the clients. That’s what I meant. So it makes sense for many people to do what you do. I do it too. But I don’t fool myself into thinking it’s the highest quality possible. I’m comfortable knowing that compared to the (still common) DV25, BetaSP, and HDV projects many people produce for similar costs, a DVCProHD production is still many, many, many times better whether you re-compress it twice or not.
[walter biscardi] “None of us could see the difference on the screen and to me that’s all that matters.”
Well I’d argue that generally things happen to the video after it leaves your shop which could be adversely affected unbeknown to you. But I don’t want to go there. As I said I do it too for some projects. We don’t own a D5 deck, so it didn’t make sense to rent one for some projects I finished which were shot on Varicam. Instead I just mastered it back to DVCProHD tape and delivered it that way. Rendering to uncompressed and mastering to D5 would have been overkill considering the budget and nature of the projects.
I am not trying to debate over how good the video looks with your workflow. I’ve done it and it looks great. Would I still do it if I were bumping up a feature to 35mm? Not in a million years. But that’s just me. Nobody’s writing a rule book so it’s fine for people to have their own opinions on the matter.
What I am saying that the workflow is not “The Absolute Best Quality”. It just isn’t. Sorry. But that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be. Many men would kill to date a woman who’s just a “9 1/2”. But it’s important that people in this field understand the concept of generational loss via multiple compressions, and how certain workflows cause the video to go through subsequent and sometimes unnecessary lossy generations. Usually it’s fine to be guilty of this. Just as long as you understand the process to be better equipped to make those decisions. I’ve heard of people who instead of using FW capture, they capture DVCProHD tapes over SDI using a DVCProHD Easy Setup – thinking they are capturing the native format of the tape (which of course they are not). These kinds of mistakes are totally unnecessary and avoidable.
Sean
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David, I never said anyone NEEDS to do it. I said they need to do it to preserve full-quality. Big difference. Is preserving the full quality always necessary? No. Is the loss from 2 generations of DVCPro HD compression bad or noticeable right away? No. Obviously it’s better than any SD or HDV workflow. But the fact is it is NOT full-quality when you re-render it. It goes through another round of lossy compression. This may not even be visible on your monitor when it leaves your shop, but the damage is there and can potentially show up later on (like MPEG compression for DVD or broadcast). This is a good website regarding the issue:
https://codecs.onerivermedia.com/So the only way to preserve everything is to render on a 8 or 10-bit UC timeline. But if someone can’t afford the disk requirements for an uncompressed finishing workflow then I would hardly worry about it. When working with that small of a budget, no client should ever complain about a lossy DVCProHD workflow. It’s certainly 10 times better than what the same money would get them from an Avid shop. And if the plan is to deliver on DVCProHD tape, then it makes no difference either way. But you can’t just call it “full quality” when it isn’t.
Sean
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[David Battistella] “Mr. Video is FLAT OUT WRONG!!! WRONG WRONG!!!. The F900 is NOT uncompressed. It records to the HDCAM format which is a 3:1:1 compression and color scheme. The signal recorded to tape is compressed.”
I wouldn’t say he’s flat out wrong. He’s speaking in pragmatic terms that reflect the workflow. He’s saying that to work with that format you must capture it as uncompressed and thus need bigger faster drives. But yes, as far as compression on the tape, HDCam is far from uncompressed.
[David Battistella] “3. HDX-900 means you can edit on firewire drives and deliver that same FULL QUALITY sequence to a digital house for a film out.”
That’s only true if you use the right workflow. Any transitions, filters, opacity, size change or CC (basically any alteration of the picture other than cuts only editing) will not be full quality if you render back out to DVCProHD (or print to DVCProHD tape). If there are any effects, you need to render the final output on an uncompressed sequence to maintain full quality.As for some other posts in the thread, you do not need a Fiber Channel array for uncompressed HD. You can use an 8-disk external SATA array which will work great and cost a lot less.
Sean
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[Uli Plank] “I can’t see much of a difference between one business owning the whole nation’s wealth or the government owning all businesses…”
Well I can see a difference. First off, the word Communism doesn’t even belong in this conversation. SK is a Democracy – owning the telco does not make it Communism. If a particular industry is nationalized and the democratically elected government owns and controls it, the public essentially has almost complete control over it. Equating the government owning an industry with Communism is a disgusting flaw in logical thinking.
Now if one private business owns telco with little or no government regulation, then they control everything without any regard to what the public interest is. Unless the public can vote and elect the CEO and board members, you can’t even begin to compare the two concepts as being similar. HUGE difference.
Sean
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[David Shallis] ”
-Would I be better off trunking the built-in NIC with a cheap third party NIC, neither of which support Jumbo frames, or buying a Small Tree 1 port card that does Jumbo Frames, on the workstations ?-Networking 101 sorta question: if I just used the built-in NIC to connect to the switch, how would I get the computers to connect to the internet… Can you have two network connections running simultaneously in OS X ?”
Sorry I didn’t reply to this. Been outta town for the holidays.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to use different types of NICs on the same trunk (I really don’t know though). I bought the Small Tree 2-port NICs and trunked those together.
This is how it works. My Mac has two “subnets” (I think that’s the right term). The small tree 2-port card connects to a dedicated switch which is only for the SAN. Nothing else. No router, no internet connected to this card. The IP is static (not dynamic) on it’s own separate network (which you assign a manual IP address in Network System Prefs). The IP address is 192.168.1.10. Notice the “.1” part. That is the subnet.
So that’s the SAN, but my third NIC, the built-in one (192.168.0.10), still connects to the regular office network (router and internet). I also use this for the metadata for MetaSAN. The “.0” in the address means its on a totally different network. It will not communicate with or interfere with the SAN devices (because those are all on the “.1” subnet).
I’m not sure exactly how it works, but OSX knows to use the built-in ethernet card (“.0”) for Internet and regular file sharing.
Unfortunately I’m not an IT guy. I just taught myself how to set up our ethernet SAN and it was a lot of time and work. I didn’t see the wisdom in investing in a FC solution, especially with cheap 10gbe around the corner. It works now and I think it was a good move. It also gave me more job security since nobody understands how to work it but me :). Point being, you might be better off asking someone else. For every one editor, there are 100 networking experts. So it shouldn’t be too hard.
Sean