Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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If you’re concerned about whether or not it’s coming in OK, don’t be. Tranferring to and from FW is a clean process, so monitoring for the sole purpose of quality assurance is completely unnecessary. Unlike analog or SDI,
alterations cannot occur during the capture process with FW. This includes noise, color shifts, dropouts, sparklies, and alterations in audio levels. It just doesn’t work that way. What you capture will be identical to what is on the tape. So the only purpose to monitor while capturing is if you want to view the content simply to save time – in which case just monitor from the deck like these guys suggested.Sean
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That’s the same system we use at our place. Works great. Newegg and Firmtek have both saved us a fortune.
Sean
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You’re going to have to read up on this stuff and learn about the subject. Onerivermedia.com is a great place to check out. The basic concepts are not all that complicated and they apply to SD as well as HD.
The Sony and the JVC are both HDV (the JVC is not DVCPro). HDV is prosumer quality and is the worst HD format available because it uses very heavy compression and will not withstand even a low amount of generational loss. That said, it’s probably better than shooting on any SD format. HD is that much better. Just don’t recompress to that format during any part of your workflow. Capture it at uncompressed during the finishing process.
The Panasonic uses DVCPro HD format which is definatetly a professional quality format – although barely. For any broadcast production, shooting on this format is absolutely fine, although like HDV, I’d avoid recompression and/or mastering back to this format after post.
Sean
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I lost a weeks worth of work thanks to them. I’d bet good money that if you buy a pair of Firmtek cards, your problems will dissapear. You don’t have Maxtor drives by any chance do you?
Sean
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I have a 1200A. Never had a problem laying off. I set the timeline to 58:00:00, start the show at 1:00:00. Then I just run “Print to Video” and hit record on the deck. When it’s all done, the TC on the tape matches the TC in the sequence exactly.
On a seperate note, I have to take issue with mastering to DVCProHD from a quality standpoint. From what I’ve seen so far, I really consider it an aquisition format only (albiet a very good one). But it’s not suitable for post IMO. The codec is too damn lossy and you’ll really start to notice it after as little as 3 generations.
If you can keep a firewire-only native workflow going, then it’s great. But if you have to do color correction or anything else that require recompression, I think you should master it to D5 or HDCam.
Sean
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I’ll be honest – had I known someone from LaCie was active on this board, I would have been more polite about it. I feel like a jerk and I apologize. I will say that their customer service is good. But my personal experience with the products has been exceptionally bad.
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Your sequence should be and has to be based whatever tape format you are outputting to. If you deliver on DVCam, use a DV sequence. If it’s Digibeta use an Uncompressed SD sequence. For HDCam, use Uncompressed 720p. So you’re kind of asking the wrong question. You should ask what format to deliever on. You ‘ll have to decide that yourself. Render some of the DV to Uncompressed, and render some of the graphics to SD. Then decide which tradeoff you prefer. If the DV footage is well lit, the color-sample artifacts that occur when going to Uncompressed will not be as noticable. Then again, the graphics may look good in SD and if money is a factor, SD will save you a lot.
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LaCie is garbage. I’ve had two non-RAID drives completely fail. I’ve bought 5 of them. 2 out of 50 failing is bad, let alone 2 out of 5. I’ve heard countless stories of the same thing, including someone in the office next door. They use dirt cheap Maxtor drives, the QC is non-existant, and the enclosure design causes them to run way too hot. And they’re not inexpensive whatsoever. They market these things as if they were a Porche and they charge almost accordingly. I would reccomend any other external drive solution from any other brand over LaCie.
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Field dominance is different for NTSC and PAL. So I don’t know the specifics of what P-JPEG and MPEG should be.
What I do know is that the only way I could get it to work is to export directly to Compressor.
If iDVD (which I’ve never used) doesn’t allow you to import MPEG files, then I would suggest using DVD Studio Pro, which is what I use.
Sean
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I’ve never seen this or heard of this problem. You know that the viewer overlay controls are seperate from the canvas ones, right?
Sean