[Shane Dillon]

Hi All,

Thanks for all the responses, and so quick too. What a great forum, I just wish I had found it earlier.

We get a range of material shot on Varicam, from all over the globe. To be fair it really isn’t that compareable to film in terms of quality. The compression artifacts can clearly be seen in our daVinci suite on the original camera source tapes.

For the cost of the equipment, I guess it is good for what you are paying. But to compare the quality to HDCAM, especially the SR Cinealta, there is no comparison, but then again it is five times the price!

The variable framerate is a nice feature, but the Tornado camera has that feature, and has a much higher resolution, but again is priced alot more. Sony are also developing a variable frame rate for the CineAlta camera.

Interms of Offline disappearing, I am not too sure. I don’t have any clients that are willing to pay $800 per hour to choose shots and make an EDL.

Making dubs for variable framerate stuff is a crazy solution. What if you have 80 tapes, like I did on a recent project?

In all I think the system is fine for ‘low-end’ HD, but for major stuff, it doesn’t work.

Believe me we have tried.

And Rob, I remember all the hassles had with a movie (Forget About it) in Arizona, it was an absolute nightmare. For a movie you need to offline, and there was no way to do it short of making dubs.

All I want is for Panasonic to add a SD output that can handle variable framerate, so offlines are achieveable. And as for serious color correct, to add a correct VITC record, like any other VTR.

To me it is almost there, but not quite. But it has been this way for almost six years.

Just my 2 cents.

All the best,

Shane

[Shane Dillon]

We have Final Cut here too. However if you are dealing with 24 or 60, then it is fine. I am talking about the true variable framerate, ie anything from 4fps to 60fps. Final Cut actually renders new clips when they are odd framerates, and these new clips don’t hold the correct timecode and reel names, so an EDL from that is pretty much useless. You have to finish the job on FCP really.

As Panasonic told us, there really is no solution when using variable framerates when offlining in SD. All editing would have to be done in HD, or you have to do a dub, then use those as masters.

[Shane Dillon]

My problem is getting the project from the laptop to Online.

I think I met you in Arizona, and we had exactly the same problems there. You couldn’t get a list from the Avid to the eQ.

It only works if you stay in from start to finish on one machine, which really is not possible with big projects that need many tools.