[Uli Plank]

I’m using three striped Samsung drives (the newer ones with 16 MB cache) in a MacPro and they capture uncompressed 8 bit HD from our DeckLink Extreme without a hiccup to the very last bit. With 10 bit HD it’s getting tight, you’d have occasional dropped frames in the last 20% or so of RAID space.
So, to be on the safe side I’d rather go for four drices in the RAID

[Uli Plank]

Do you own the HD version? I’d like to know some good settings for it, since until now I wasn’t too impressed with the quality as compared to H.264, but I always hear they should be on par.

TIA,

Uli

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

[Uli Plank]

Well (under pressure from Hollywood) European legislation made it illegal to use the mentioned software, even if we had the right to single private copies before.

Apart from that, the initial question didn’t really sound like this is meant for fully legal purposes. Remember, this is a forum with many professionals who make their income from producing video and who suffer from pirating. I think it’s quite understandable that we don’t welcome such questions.

Uli

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

[Uli Plank]

Yes, HD Log from Imagine Products is great, but a bit pricey. Another one comes from Squarebox in the UK, called CatDV.

Regards,

Uli

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

[Uli Plank]

He could convert it to AIC (which FCE is using for HDV), but that’ll take some time.

Regards,

Uli

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

[Uli Plank]

It’s slow during transfer to the computer. I’m talking about a Mac, since I like the excellent support of MXF in Final Cut Pro 5.2.1, but the Mac is notorious for the bad USB support. Here are a few values from my dear collegue Bjoern Adamski:

AJ-PCS060 Panasonic P2-Store: To pump your P2 cards dry you can use Panasonic

[Uli Plank]

You will be disappointed with the transfer times from the P2-Store too, I’m afraid. It’s terribly slow.

Regards,

Uli

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

[Uli Plank]

Yes, it works. We bought ourselves an Acer Aspire laptop with a large screen, Duo Core CPU and installed a 7200 rpm drive plus HDV-Rack from Serious Magic (now owned by Adobe). Apart from being our field monitor with all the instruments you’d normally just have in a studio, it can record straight to disk.
But we use it as a backup only, I wouldn’t feel safe with this as the only recording device. Apart from seriously impeding your ability to move the camera around, what happens when your laptop has a hiccup or a even full crash?
If P2 cards are too expensive, get a FireStore.

Regards,

Uli

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

[Uli Plank]

The FireStore is in high demand (guess why), we had to wait for ours quite a few weeks. But it works very well for us, even if we had a bad charger at first delivery (the replacement came quickly). They claim to have a solution for 24pn via firmware update soon (stripping the extra frames in the device).

Out of curiosity I tried copying in host mode to an iPod, but it was awfully slow plus you have to reformat it to an older PC format. After that experience I installed my music again and decided it’s not worth the hassle.

Regards,

Uli

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

[Uli Plank]

Having done extensive tests of the Sonys, the Canon H1, JVC HD100 and the Pana HVX200 (and then we bought one Pana and two Sonys), I dare to disagree:

– Yes, the Canon has the best resolution of the bunch and a decent pseudo-progressive mode (as opposed to the Sonys). BUT: IMHO the standard lens on it is far worse than the fixed one on the Panasonic.
– It has severe chromatic aberration
– Manual focusing is close to impossible, no reproduceable angle, no zoom plus focus, ‘jelly’-like reaction to operation of the focus ring
IMHO the Canon badly needs replacement of the standard lens, but at least here in Europe Canon is not giving you the option from the start, you need to buy both the bundled lens plus an expensive better one. Go figure the price point!

The Panasonic has the best electronic lens I ever had between my fingers, it’s coming as close to a true mechanic lens as I’ve touched yet (you can guess I learned my profession with traditional lenses).
– Best wide angle of the bunch
– Low chromatic aberration
– Clear relationship between angle and focus
– Focus while you zoom

And it can look quite impressive to the client with a professional matte/filter box with French flag, a follow-focus, a wireless sound transmitter plus a good shoulder rig…

The DVCPro HD format on P2 is far more robust than HDV on tape. A single dropout on HDV can ruin a full GOP (about half a second!). I’m sorry to hear that you had a P2 card go bad on you. We never made such an experience with our two 8 GB cards. Even our FireStore works very well since the latest firmware update. Download times via a PCMCIA card slot are far better than your numbers both on a Apple PowerBook and a PC laptop, better than realtime when we shoot native.
In Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 the support of the P2 format is excellent and the load on the machine from intra-frame DVCProHD is far less than HDV with it’s inter-frame compression, even my old PowerBook (non Intel) can handle it very well, while it would need hours to conform HDV.
It’s true, the HVX200 has a tad less resolution than the Canon, but when we screened a 35mm film transfer of our footage many (experienced cinema folks) in the screening room thought it originated on Super 16…

Regards,

Uli

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