[Stephen De vere]

From an HD Camera course I attended earlier this year in Bristol, run by BBC, I understood that this is not recoverable – atleast that there was no know conversion that would allow the result to pass BBC HD programming specs. I don’t know the technical reasons why.

You could try asking Alan Roberts over on https://forums.dvdoctor.net/forumdisplay.php?f=35 (HDV and HD forum).
He is a technical consultant who still does work for BBC and knows the Varicam and other HD cameras well.

[Stephen De vere]

Never too late, thanks. That looks like a viable alternative, though I worry about the storage required (generally rather high shooting ratios in wildlife productions), but could always go the offline route.

Are you shooting with the camera system frequency at 60Hz ? It sounds from your article/blog that you might be shooting with camera system frequency at 59.94 to obtain “….59.94/60fps source files” over Firewire.

Did you really notice no difference in quality ? What do you monitor on within FCP ?

Stephen.

[Stephen De vere]

blaqhole,

Dado Valentic’s June ’07 article “The Right Workflow” on showreel.org describes a DVCProHD workflow using 24(23.98) in Varicam and in Avid Xpress Pro HD for several Discovery Channel TV shows made with Lion TV in London. Shame he doesn’t say why 24 was used. Other post houses followed the example afterwards.

The same workflow also avoids possibly costly frame rate conversions if you shoot stuff offspeed in the Varicam.

Dado Valentic runs Mytherapy, an LA-style boutique for digital cinema in London.

Sorry I’m not the expert to tell you useful things first-hand but I hope this helps your search !

[Stephen De vere]

This is a great document on the ins and outs of capturing with (film and) digital for 35mm film release. Written in Pal land, though London’s Soho postproduction world works for international (often US) clients.

Under “Technical Papers > Digital Film Scene-to-Screen”
https://www.digitalpraxis.net/zippdf/scene-to-screen.pdf

Haven’t read it all yet but it says it explains in more detail about audio problems going from 25fps to 24fps (but not the other way round). Stretching and pitch-correcting audio can apparently cause phasing/sync errors between channels.

[Stephen De vere]

Just happened to have read this website recently about a film production in UK. They decided to shoot it 24p on the Varicam for 35mm release.

https://www.digitalpraxis.net/credo.htm

“The idea was to shoot 24fps progressive as the goal is for a theatrical release, and previous projects have had problems when shooting 25fps for a 24fps film deliverable. The main problems seem to come from audio re-timing, with left-to-right phasing errors being introduced when re-timing and re-pitching the audio

[Stephen De vere]

Thanks Gary.

Yes I know about the Varicam forum but I couldn’t find anything on this topic there and this seemed like the right place to post.

[Stephen De vere]

And it works for all 4-60fps frame rates shot in camera, working in a 25p timeline ?

[Stephen De vere]

Thanks Gary.

“Not sure where you got that from.”

I heard it from a UK TV producer I’ve been shooting Varicam with – we were talking ways to reduce production costs of the Panasonic converter machine time (which are considerable on wildlife documentaries where shooting ratios are fairly high and offspeed shooting is frequent).

I had a look at the Kona cards website but couldn’t see anything about frame rate converting Varicam variable frame rate footage.

I’m just a cameraman, and a non-technical one at that, but what actually happens when the Kona deals with say a 5 second 60fps shot that will become a longer shot at normal (25fps) playback speed ? What happens with timecode ?

[Stephen De vere]

I’ll try and wait. Do you have an email alert list I can go on for when it’s ready ?

[Stephen De vere]

Ed,

You sound like you know what it’s all about – if you’ve got a moment to advise it would be much appreciated.

I’m in the proccess of upgrading storage for my MDD Dual G4/1.25 and plan to go SATA (on George Loch’s wise advice) and come up with this:

1/. Put in 3x 320GB SATA drives all connected to a SATA 4-port PCI card. Is this ok having them all on the same PCI slot ?

2/. The 80GB system drive and a 120GB drive are currently on the ATA66 channel. Where would you put and connect these two drives ? One on 100ATA bus and the other on the 66ATA ? Or shall I use the now ‘spare’ ATA133 RAID PCI card for the system drive ?

I’m preparing for my first DV50 online and don’t plan to need uncompressed realtime so I was not going to RAID stripe anything.