[Tom Brooks]

There’s nothing at all wrong with your free DVCAM to DigiBeta route. You lose nothing in the process of recording to DVCAM over FireWire.

To get from the DVCAM deck to DigiBeta, the best way would be via SDI. Very little loss there either. IF the DVCAM deck doesn’t have SDI out, the next best would be analog component out of the DVCAM to the DigiBeta. The loss would be very minimal.

No sense in worrying about the 4:1:1, since you’re locked into that from the moment you recorded onto DV.

[Tom Brooks]

Neutrik makes a little Windows program called Patchlabel.exe that you should be able to Google for.

[Tom Brooks]

Thanks Barry. I’ve read your very fine book, but didn’t have it with me to answer this question. Yes, I was shooting 480p.

[Tom Brooks]

To clarify one thing: I could not see the 2-3 beats per second with my naked eyes–this was only apparent on the camera’s LCD or viewfinder.

[Tom Brooks]

AVI should work with IMA 4:1, MP3, or None (uncompressed PCM audio). Most windows machines will have those audio codecs.

[Tom Brooks]

What are your Motion project settings? Do they match FCP sequence?

[Tom Brooks]

[Fine Productions] “what did you mean by: “the Kona manual tells how the component cables become the luma and chroma cables in S-video mode and composite in that mode”

Sean,
You should have a copy of a PDF version of the manual. If you can’t find it on your system (Kona Utilities folder??), you can download it from the AJA website. Your LHe has 3 BNC cables for analog output. You can use the Kona control panel to set the analog video to composite, S-video, or Component. When it’s set to S-video, two of the three cables are used for luma and chroma. The PDF manual tells which two to use–I don’t have it in front of me at the moment (probably green is luma and red is chroma?). You don’t need the Kona breakout box to use this feature. The AJA support people can help with system setup issues.

It’s pretty critical to get familiar with the Kona Control Panel and to understand what it does for you, because you need to change its settings for certain special situations. I have no clue on the color problem you describe. The things to troubleshoot would be your FCP settings, your monitoring, your Kona control panel settings, and your cabling.
-Tom

[Tom Brooks]

Yeah, I have a separate card for my system. Only one I could find at the time I needed it was from Firewire Direct (they were good)– it’s called a Nitro AV or something to that effect. I believe it has one FW800 and several FW400 ports. I have used my G-RAIDs (FW800) on the built-in and the video device (FW400) on the PCIe card AND the other way ’round. They seem to be about the same to me and the Kona speed test comes out the same either way. G-TEch shows a PCIe card on their website that should be available by now, but I can’t say as it would achieve any different result. My system has been completely trouble free with the Nitro card.

By the way, it didn’t work at all with some camcorders and VTRs without the card, as expected. Some camcorders slow the bus down to 200mbps or less.
-Tom

Final Cut Studio, FCP 5.1.2, After Effects 6.5 Pro, Quicktime 7.1.3, G5 Quad 2.5, Kona-LHe V3, 4.5GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800-GT, G-RAID 2x1TB FW800.

[Tom Brooks]

The Kona manual tells how the component cables become the luma and chroma cables in S-video mode and composite in that mode. You would need an additional adaptor cable to connect S-video to the DVD recorder. For composite, you’ll only need a BNC to RCA adaptor.

[Tom Brooks]

In certain rooms a shotgun mic doesn’t help and a very close-mounted omni mic will work better. The shotgun’s directional pickup will be able to isolate wanted sound from unwanted if the two sources are essentially coming from different sides of the room. Getting the mic close to the sound source is crucial. Also, hard surfaces not only bounce the sound around in a room but they can effectively change the polar response of a mic. Example: If you point a shotgun mic down at a smooth concrete floor, you get all the sound bouncing off that floor from every direction, defeating the directional nature of the mic. If your talent is standing on the concrete floor, you’re better off holding the shotgun low and pointing it up so that it points at the talent but not at the hard floor.

So get close with a mic, then think direction, and think about how surfaces will affect the directionality of the mic.

Once recorded, you can consider noise reduction. The noise reduction filter in Soundtrack Pro works pretty well. You sample an area of your audio clip that contains the type of sound you want to get rid of. Then, you reduce that noise throughout the clip (check the help for specifics). Constant, mechanical noise like AC is not too hard to reduce with this type of filter. In your case, you would sample just the room sound, without any dialog or other sound if possible. If you get too heavy-handed with the noise reduction you will affect your desired sound source in a bad way. Try it and see if you can get get good consistent results with it.