Mad Pal varicam question in NTSC forum, help!

Mad Pal varicam question in NTSC forum, help!

Here in Europe (germany) I have encountered the following problem with variable frame rates

1. The camera men have filmed with 60p for slow motion effects.

2. We need to get our 60p material into a 25p time line because, yes it´s PAL land (I know this is a NTSC forum!)

3. If we can manage the above then getting it back out in 25p to tape should be OK???

Windows based AVID Express Pro HD 2.1 HD
OR
FCP 5.0, Mac G5, 2.5GHz, 2GB Ram Black Magic (Single)
WITH
Panasonic AJ_HD1200A

Thoughts, comments would be very welcome,

thanks
Paul



A line has 2 Sides

[finalbug.net]
[paurray.de]
[lostsensemedia.org]

Hi Paul,

nope, not just an NTSC forum here. It's gotten pretty international really, writing from Munich myself.

So how did the cam dept set up the camera? For you to use the 1200a and the software conversion method in FCP, they should have set the system frequency to either 23.98 or 29.97 or 59.94. There are several other settings in the camera's setup menu, but afaik the only ones compatible with software frc are those three.

Are you familiar with this:

[eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp]

hth,
Clay

Hi ClayC

We can get it into the system (FCP) with the Black Magic (HD SDI)...

Our problem is how can we get the 60p material into a 25p timeline without losing the slow motion effect.

With respect to the 59.94 Hz and 60 Hz Question, I can not answer this we only have the recorder and can press the counter button on the recorder and it shows either 25 or 60! Depending on whether the camera man wanted slow motion or not!

If it was really 59.94 would we see this, on the counter?

What is the difference?

We just don´t understand this.

Perhaps there is some info online?

Currently we haven´t got the firewire option for the 1200A.

Do you if it´s posible to work natively over fire wire this way with 60 Hz?

With either/or Avid or FCP?

thanks
Paul&Martin

Paul&Martin,

Don't know about Avid. Maybe someone else here will offer some assistance, or try the varicam forum over at creativecow.

In FCP you're fine to work with firewire 400 from the 1200a in most situations, but if your deck doesn't have the firewire board installed, you need to go out with HDI. That should work over your Blackmagic card if it has an HDI input. The problem you have is how to do the off-speed frame rate conversion. Do you have the software tools installed? Read this:

www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/dvcpro_hd_workflow_balis.html

Alternatively, can you get hold of the Panasonic FRC-27 frame rate converter? I much prefer it:

[catalog2.panasonic.com]

Don't know about Berlin, but Ludwig Kameraverleih in Munich has one. You play out from the deck to the FRC-27 via HDI. The FRC-27 does the frame rate conversion more or less instantly. You can then play out the converted material from the FRC-27 in 1080i50. There's a lot of tweaky twitchy settings involved, but the learning curve isn't too bad if you plan some time for testing.

If you're still stuck, you can write to me off-line at oasys@lcm.de. I'll mail you my phone number in Munich and we can discuss solutions.

Clay

Many thanks Clay,

We now have other problems. But perhaps I/we will get in touch in the future.

By the way we´re here in Niederbayern! by "blue paw artists"

we don´t want to use the frame conversion because we´d have to encode the material twice. On the way in and out i.e. quality would suffer.

we would have problems batching because of the slow motion

and last but by no means least we don´t have the space to store uncompressed on line for months on end

thanks once again

Paul

Paul,

coupla things still incorrect in your understanding of the workflow:

1. >>we don´t want to use the frame conversion because we´d have to encode the material twice. On the way in and out i.e. quality would suffer.<<

Not true. You don't lose quality when you do the frame rate conversion. Whether you use the software method or the FRC-27, all the material stays in DVCProHD. Also, using either the software or hardware method, you still have to do the conversion. There's just no way around doing it twice when offspeed shots are involved. It's how the codec works and how it was designed to handle frame rate conversion.

Look at the orginal camera tapes as just being a temporary storage medium. As you'll notice on playback prior to conversion, there're unusable for anything else other than as a basis for the conversion. The converted files, which you can of course play back to tape for backup, will be up to double the playback duration of the camera tapes, depending on the frame rates they were shot at. They will have the same starting timecode, but a much different ending timecode. You will also lose all the audio if any audio was captured in camera. If you want to keep any camera audio, you have to capture it in separately. The frame rate converted files are therefore your production masters, not the camera tapes.

2. >>and last but by no means least we don´t have the space to store uncompressed on line for months on end<<

Not true either. You're confusing DVCProHD with Uncompressed HD. In fact, they are two completely different flavors of HD. When you import, you capture as DVCProHD, which is roughly 50GB per hour in 1080i50. Uncompressed HD at 1080i50 is about 500GB per hour, or ten times DVCProHD.

If you are using external drives for edit and storage, they need be FW800. You can even capture directly to an external FW800 drive provided that it is on a separate FW800 bus card (about 60 Euros, needs 1 free slot). Leaving about 10 percent headroom, a 1TB external drive will give you somewhere around 19 hours of 1080i50 converted files in full online quality. A Raid is of course better from a backup point of view, but FW800 can handle DVCProHD easily.

Bottom line: The main reason directors and cameramen like to shoot Varicam is for the variable frame rate functionality. Being able to deal with it in post is a specialty with a learning curve attached.

Gruß aus München,
Clay

Hi Clay

Many, many thanks for your patience....

Workflow reality check

1) capture material 1080i 60p DVCProHD format over SDI (we currently have no fire wire card for the recorder!)

2) use the panasonic frame rate convertor plug in FCP to convert our 60 frames material into a 25 frame time line. The question is then what should the timeline settings be?

One way of understanding this frame rate question would be....

60 frames on tape is equal to one second on tape

However the same 60 frames in a 25 timeline would mean 2.4 seconds

3) This would mean that we need to calculate enough space for the original unconverted material.

4) Enough space to convert. i.e. point 3 times 2.4

5) 10% head room.

I forgot to mention that we have a Xserve raid system with something like 3.7 Terabytes.
This needless to say presently full.

We then print to tape with a FCP timeline which is compatible with our recorder. See question above by point 2 above.

Will contact you privately when I have a chance.

Gruß aus
Mallersdorf
Paul

Hi Paul,

glad to be of help, or at least steer you in the right directions.

To be able to straighten out the workflow as well as address your timeline issues and questions (still some homework to do on that), the next thing to nail down is how the footage was originally recorded. Can the camera dept tell you what system frequency the camera was set to and what frame rates they photographed at?

It is really crucial to know this because it will determine whether or not you can even use the software conversion method at all. At the moment you are assuming that you can, but that may well not be the case. Without some more detailed info, its going to mean several hours of guesswork and testing to get the capture, conversion and timeline settings working properly.

As far as storage space is concerned, you need to initailly allow for both the unconverted raw footage and the subsequent conversion. The converted material can require somewhere around double the space of the original unconverted footage, depending on the frame rates it was photographed at. Once the conversion is done, however, you can then trash the uncoverted stuff or back it up to disk. The converted files are new self-contained discrete media clips in QuickTime DVCProHD.

If you dont already have it, go over to apple.com in the software section and get the VideoSpace widget (under calculate and convert) to do the storage calculations more accurately.


Let me know if you have been able to capture and convert or not, and what settings you are using or have tried.

Best,
Clay