[Uli Plank]

We own a few BlackMagic cards and they do what you need and display excellent quality on our JVC 1710 tube. Those who own an AJA product will probably tell you the same. AJA claims higher quality, but I had difficulties really seeing that when we compared before buying.

Are you working in a 60 or 50 Hz area? Some things are not (yet?) fully supported in 720p for 25/50.

The advantage of Blackmagic cards: You can port them to a PC if needed (if it has the same card slots). AJA products are different on the PC side, AFAIK.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

I’d also suggest breaking it up into shorter sequences.
But you should also check your RAM, I’d expect slowness, but no frequent crashing. Did you add RAM, and where does it come from?

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Hi Sean,

great info! We still have 1.04 and didn’t consider it could be done in a PCI slot, thank you.

We are using Samsungs (the new ones with 16 MB cache) and had no problems with them in any other setup. There must be more than 30 of them running in our labs by now. Low heat, low noise, none broke until now (knock on wood). I’ve steered away from Maxtor a long time ago after bad experiences. But what can one say, even a Seagate Barracuda (less than two years old) died on me last week.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

There are pro’s and con’s, I was considering the same thing (and finally decided against it).

Pro:
– You can shoot in 24p with sound (the PAL model can be hacked into 24 but will not record sound then)
– You get slo-mo with a factor of 2.5 (from 60 to 24) instead of 2 only (50 to 25)
– You can easily shoot for 60 Hz markets

Con:
– You can’t shoot 25p to integrate with European telecine’d footage
– You can’t shoot 720p50 (the format the EBU has settled for broadcast)
– Service? (Check with Pana)

Since we can always shoot 25p and slow it down to 24p for filmout, we decided to get PAL models. It’s just the reverse of what has been done with film in Europe for the last 70 years or so.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

We had three of those HighPoint cards in G5 stations with a bundle of internal disks and ran them as RAID5.

Unfortunately we had lots of false alarms, where the unit would signal a defective drive and annoy everybody in the room. Only in one single case there was really a bad drive and the software was able to recove everything as you’d expect from a RAID5 and as described by Jeremy we were even able to continue our work.

Since we don’t have a PC with the proper card slot around to upgrade the firmware, we’ve finally sent them back to the distributor for repair. They are not back yet :-((

Could you please tell me which firmware version you have?

TIA,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Sorry for pouring some water in the wine, but I had just two days ago a Seagate Barracuda (under 2 years) old die on me. I would never put my business on risk by using unprotected RAID 0 without a clever backup strategy.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

I’m very sorry to report this, but in the quite professional German forum at http://www.finalcutpro.de one editor had the same problem recently and nobody was able to offer a solution.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Who has delivered such a crappy telecine to you? That’s not the way we do it here in Europe. We speed up film from 24fps to 25fps and transfer without any judder frames. Looks smooth and clean, but that’s why “Titanic” is a few minutes shorter here on TV than in cinema

[Uli Plank]

You can’t get from 1080 to 480 by throwing away every other line

[Uli Plank]

Hi Shane,

I’m very curious about the subject as well. Until now (knock on wood!) I didn’t experience such problems with FCP 5.1.2. Do you work with folders first copied to the Mac or do you work straight from the camera or P2 card? I’d like to narrow down the issue.

TIA,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.