[Videostar]

Thanks Gary!

I’ll be capturing some more varicam in a couple of weeks so I’ll make sure the DP on the shoot follows your advice.

Also they have used two different tapestocks over two different varicam shoots so far. One is large format Panasonic DVCPRO HD 92/46 L with the red tape guard on top of the cassette and the other tape stock is
Panasonic DVCPRO 50 92/46 L with the blue tape guard on top of the cassette. I didn’t know you could use the DVCPRO 50 stock for a HD shoot but there you go.

Thanks again for all your help.

[Videostar]

Hi gary

I have tried both Kona DVCPRO HD 23.98 Varicam and the Kona DVCPRO HD 59.94 easy setups. The user-bit option on the kona control panel is switched on and it clearly shows that the card is recognizing when the tape goes from 24fps to 60fps.
I was using Kona Control software version 1.2.1, OSX 10.4.6, FCP 5.0.4.

The tape has continous timecode but they did change framerate on the same tape. It’s all greenscreen and I would typically have a three minute continuous take at 60fps followed by a 24fps slate and 6 minutes of 24fps content before it goes back to 60fps etc.

I didn’t have FCP set to ignore TC breaks, but I did try both capture now and marking in and out over short clips with plenty of pre and post roll. I pretty much got the same result with both. It would capture perfect 23.98 fps slo-mo video but it would only capture part of what actually was coming from the tape. Marking an In at 30:00:00 and Out at 40:00:00 would capture ten minutes of slo-mo video at 23.98 but the tape was playing ten minutes at 60fps which should be stretched out to 25 minutes at 23.98fps right? That’s how it works out when you go the frame rate converter route anyway, which is what I had to do in the end because the deck had to be returned to the rental shop this morning.

My work around was to capture all the 24fps as normal using the Kona DVCPRO HD 23.98 Varicam easy setup over SDI and then switching to the DVCPRO HD 720p60 easy setup and capturing the 60fps footage over firewire and using the frame converter plug-in to expand my 59.94 clips out to slo-mo 23.98 clips. Surely this isn’t how everybody works!?

As somebody who obviously has worked with varicam a lot can you tell me what I should expect to see when successfully capturing 60fps Varicam footage? In my example above I had 10 minutes (from 30:00:00 to 40:00:00) of 60 fps footage on tape. If I marked my ins and outs and captured correctly I should end up with a 25 minute long 23.98fps slo-mo clip right? So what timecode would the 25 minute clip have? Does the card just generate new timecode (which has no reference to the source on the tape) so that my twenty five minute 23.98 slo-mo clip starts at 30:00:00 and ends at 55:00:00? If it does then how would you recapture such a clip from tape if the clip doesn’t reference actual tape timecode?

I will be doing plenty more Varicam jobs so I need to figure out what I’m doing wrong here. I would imagine that a LOT of people are capturing off-speed frame rates via SDI successfully – otherwise nobody would use varicam or AJA cards right? – so I must be doing something wrong.

I appreciate any help you can give me, thanks!

[Videostar]

Hi Gary

You sound like you know the ins and outs of capturing varicam on aja cards so I think you might be able to help me.
I am working with Varicam footage (60fps and 24fps on the same tape) and I’ve been having a lot of problems capturing all my footage form the AJ-HD1200AP via HD SDI on my Kona LHe card with Final Cut 5.

Basically if there is ten minutes (at normal speed) of 60 fps footage at the end of the tape and I try and capture that entire 10 minutes as slo mo varicam footage I end up with only 4 minutes of what was on the tape – although it comes in correctly as a slo mo clip so it is actually 10 minutes long. It seems that I am capturing ten minutes worth of timecode and ten minutes worth of slo-mo video but I should end up with 25 minutes (60 fps over 10 minutes when “converted” to 24fps would be 25 mnutes) of slo mo video! I hope I’m making sense as it’s confusing me. The log and capture window displays exactly whats on the tape while it’s capturing but when I review the captured clip I have exactly ten minutes as slo mo but only 40% of what was displayed on the tape at normal speed between the in and out point.

I’ve called AJA and they didn’t have any solutions for me, I’ve tried different varicam easy setups, I’ve got user-bits turned on in the control panel and it recognizes when the footage being played from tape is 24fps and when it’s 60fps. The footage it captures at 60fps comes in as perfect slo mo but I just can’t capture all of it I can only capture exactly 40% (or 24/60) of what is on the tape between the in and out points. I called panasonic and they don’t think it’s a deck issue – I thought maybe I have to change a deck menu option so it plays out 60fps timecode?

I have been able to capture succesfully going from the deck via firewire and then using panasonics DVCPRO HD converter, but I really want to capture via HD SDI – if only because the card cost 2 grand!!!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks