HDV edit system setup

hi

i work for a large college in essex, uk, as a video production lecturer and was wndering if someone would help me out with a few questions?

we are currently running 18 final cut studio 2 suites on G5's with 4GB of RAM and split hard drives of 170GB and 500GB looking after the system and the captured footage.

what we plan to do is upgrade these entire systems next year hardware wise and go up to final cut studio 3.

does anyone have any advice on what the minimum hardware spec is we should be getting to go with final cut studio 3?

also, we want to have one of the suites (x2 systems) as a HDV room. i was thinking HDV deck, HDV monitors/screens and blu ray internal burners to burn straight from final cut 3.

can anyone with any experience give me any insight into what i'll be needing for a HDV setup? what kind of monitors should i get? or maybe i should just get commercial screens? should i also have a very basic non HD screen to check the worst case scenario? internal or external blu ray burners? do i need some sort of black magic card to play the HDV in and out?

any help would be much appreciated on this.

stephen

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does anyone have any advice on what the minimum hardware spec is we should be getting to go with final cut studio 3?

Apple publishes the minimum specifications, and you should follow them to the letter. But generally speaking, any currently-shipping Mac model that is not a MacBook will do. MacBook Pros are fine, but MacBooks have no facility for adding extra non-USB storage, and extra non-USB storage is basically mandatory for Final Cut Pro. Although the program will let you store your media on your system disk, and under some very specific circumstances that's okay, you generally have to have some kind of non-USB external storage for Final Cut. (USB drives are notorious for failing to deliver reliable data transfer rates, which means dropped frames during playback.)

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also, we want to have one of the suites (x2 systems) as a HDV room.

Do you have any flexibility here? Since this is an educational setting, my guess is you're more interested in teaching the basic concepts of production and post, and not the fiddly, situationally specific workarounds for dealing with annoying media formats. If you have anything like a choice in the matter, ditch HDV for Panasonic P2. The DVCPRO HD version of P2, not the AVC version. P2/DVCPRO HD is a little long in the tooth these days, as tapeless formats go, but it's an absolutely rock-solid workflow, and quite inexpensive to get into. It's also incredibly common out there in the real world, and the basic principles of that workflow translate well to any other tapeless workflow.

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can anyone with any experience give me any insight into what i'll be needing for an HDV HD setup?

Depends on how far you want to go. At the absolute minimum, you'll want a Mac Pro edit system with a video I/O board for monitoring. Not long ago, that I/O board would need to have HDSDI on it, and a Kona would have been my recommendation. But HDMI is basically indistinguishable from HDSDI in most respects, so you could get an inexpensive Blackmagic board with HDMI output instead and save yourself some money.

As for the monitor itself, Shane likes a brand of relatively inexpensive HD monitors the name of which totally escapes me right now. Maybe he can chime in and remind me, or you could search the forum for a previous mention. I myself have used Panasonic's low-end broadcast monitors with reasonably good results; I think the model numbers are 1700 for the base model and 1760 for the slightly more feature-rich one.

Whatever you choose here, make sure it's a broadcast monitor, and not a simple television. I'll get to why in a second.

Oh, also, if you go with the HDMI I/O board for the Mac, then do yourself a favor and pick up a little widget called the Aja HA5. It's a box about the size of a fat deck of cards that converts HDMI to HDSDI. Your broadcast monitor will have HDSDI input, and the HA5 does a great job of converting to that signal from HDMI. I've used it myself often.

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should i also have a very basic non HD screen to check the worst case scenario?

Eh. Depends how much emphasis you plan on putting on the SD downconvert when you teach. I don't think it's very important to show an SD downconvert myself, because in the real world you're generally either working in HD or SD. This is not always the case, of course, but it's true in my experience more often than not.

If you do want an SD downconvert, then ditch the Blackmagic I/O board and put in a Kona LH. That board will do a real-time SD downconvert for you, if it's asked to, and it has a separate composite output for it. That'll mean you need fewer DAs and signal converters and stuff.

Regardless of whether you have an SD monitor in the room, you really should have two HD monitors. You should have a broadcast monitor, and then a separate consumer-grade HDTV. Feed them both with the same signal (either using the two HDSDI outputs of the Kona break-out box or a single output piped through a DA). Why? Two reasons. First, because that's how it's always done in the "real world," and your students should see that. And second, because the two pictures will be different, and your students should see that as well. You don't need to invest $20,000 in a Cinetal "god monitor" to show your students the difference between a calibrated reference monitor and a consumer television; just the fact that you can point to one monitor and declare "This is our god monitor" and show them that the TV picture looks different will be enough to get the message across. For bonus points, leave the consumer-grade HDTV set to the out-of-the-box picture settings. Odds are the brightness and saturation will be turned up way too high, making the picture look not slightly different from the broadcast monitor, but drastically so. That's how things work in this business, and your students should get that.

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internal or external blu ray burners?

External. Blu Ray is far from an established delivery format, marketing hype to the contrary. It remains to be seen whether it'll achieve the ubiquity of DVD, or whether it'll go the way of DVHS and disappear from the market as a commercial failure. Not only are external Blu Ray recorders much easier to get working, they also have the advantage of being easily re-sold or chucked in a closet when they're no longer useful.

>As for the monitor itself, Shane likes a brand of relatively inexpensive HD monitors the name of
>which totally escapes me right now.

I think he mentioned the Panasonic Pro Plasma range recently, as a relatively cheaper alternative to a decent looking display.

I've been hearing about the FSI monitors recently, but I'm actually wondering how they compare to the HP Dreamcolor LP2480zx.

The Dreamcolor uses a 30 bit panel, however, it requires remapping to RGB signals to utilize the Dreamcolor engine, which I believe can be done with an AJA Hi5.

This actually looks pretty good:

[h71028.www7.hp.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

I do some teaching too, here's a few thoughts.

1. Have a look at those new 27" iMacs. If your students are mostly editing their own films in FCP in various HD formats (HDV, AVCHD, etc), these new machines appear to me to be perfect. Add some simple audio monitoring and you're good to go.

2. A Cinema Display or Eizo Color Edge (my personal favorite) is fine for student projects for external monitoring. No need for cards. Connect directly to the iMac.

3. Watch out for HDV. It was the last tape-based format brought to market and is already fading. Imho, it's not a technology I would invest in at all anymore. The megatrend on all levels is to tapeless as well as to other better formats. Also, the Canon EOS, Nikon D90 and Panasonic Lumix type cameras are booming. Students are going to want to use these (with good lenses) much more in the future than struggle with HDV's comparatively very poor optics and awful compression. Maybe keep one or two suites enabled for HDV tape playouts, but realizing that this is going to become pretty irrelavant very soon (except perhaps for archival and retrieval).

4. I'd look into designating two suites as finishing stations and equip those to broadcast standard (HD and SD) with MacPros, Blackmagic or Kona cards, high end audio monitoring, broadcast monitors and color correcting control surfaces. Since most of the student's time is probably spent on ingesting, selecting, editing, reshooting, editing some more, etc., they don't need the pro stuff untill the very end of their projects. The money you would save on equipping the other 16 suites with basic editing gear could probably pay for this.

5. Wheel and deal. Doing an full upgrade on 18 suites should give you a lot of leverage on pricing. Do you have a local Apple Video Solutions Expert to help you assemble the package and do a fully tested turnkey install as well as provide ongoing support? The support issue is critical in an installation of that size, especially if your operators are students who, because they're not yet that experienced, do mess things up from time to time, don't they? :-)

hth,
Clay

hi all,

thanks for your incredibly informative replies.

ill have a closer look at the panasonic P2. we have a few HDV cams at the moment but i think it would be good to have a wide range for differing student levels. i presume the black magic hdmi card can cope with both.

so, the setup will consist of a mac, an apple cinema display, a HD broadcast monitor, a standard HD tv and either a blackmagic or a kona card. this system would be used for hd editing and sd editing as the students are of different levels. do i need another tv monitor? which card would be best?

do i really need an expensive hd broadcast monitor for student work? can i not just have a sd monitor and a hd tv? i have to keep in mind that we are just a college and not a large university...budgets are tight.

steve

Every edit suite will have a broadcast monitor, and any edit suite where supervised sessions are held will have a broadcast monitor and a client monitor. If you want to build a sort of simulation of a real-world edit suite, equip it with a broadcast monitor and a client monitor so your students will "get it."

As for whether you need an expensive broadcast monitor, heck no. As I said before, you don't need a Cinetal. You can get away with a few-thousand-dollars industrial-grade (for lack of a better term) monitor here. Just declare, ex cathedra, that that's your god monitor.

In the real world, the purpose of the god monitor is to be your absolute reference. Assuming you're working in television as opposed to theatrical, the god monitor is the thing that looks like a properly calibrated, Platonic-ideal television. (In the opposite case, your "god monitor" is a whole room, even a significant fraction of a whole building, that represents the Platonic-deal cinema.) You know that living-room televisions are not Platonic-ideal televisions, but the problem is that not only are they different from the ideal, they're also different from each other in totally unpredictable ways. You have to have some known point of reference. If you bring a tape over to my facility, and everything is working correctly, then what we see on my god monitor will match what you saw on your god monitor to within an acceptable margin of error. So I don't have to wonder, "Gosh, did he mean for this to be so dark?" or "That girl's cheeks are way too red" or whatever. What you saw is the same as what I'm seeing (to within an acceptable margin of error), so I know you made it that way on purpose.

Some facilities have a god monitor in every room. Some that do both offline and online work have god monitors in only the online rooms. Some have only one god monitor in the whole building (in the case, for example, that their "god monitor" is a whole theater). But everybody has that point of reference that they consider to be absolute. Or at least "absolute enough," if you know what I mean. If mathematical near-perfection costs $20,000 a room, but pretty-darned-close costs $5,000 a room, and close-enough costs $2,500 a room, it's easy to see why close-enough would, in fact, be close enough for a lot of people.

Since the shows cut in the room we're talking about will never leave it, it doesn't matter what the relationship is between what you declare to be your god monitor ? your absolute point of reference, your baseline against which all else is compared ? and anybody else's god monitor. In the real world, you'd want your god monitor to be the same as mine or anybody else's, within the aforementioned acceptable margin of error. But in your case, you're never going to compare your work with anybody else's, so the function of the god monitor is just to demonstrate to your students that not all monitors are equivalent, that there are such things as god monitors, and that in the real world it's really important to know which monitor (or monitors) in your facility are the god monitors and which are just TVs.

Of course, it's possible to take this approach too far. You could plop a 12" black-and-white tube television from the 1970s into your room and declare it to be the god monitor, but nobody would buy it. At a minimum, you need a decent monitor with SDI input and basic controls (like blue-gun-only and underscan). Throw some SMPTE bars up on it, get it calibrated at least to the point where it's not wrong, then anoint it and move on. If it's a little too warm or a little too contrasty, who cares? Your notional god monitor doesn't have to match mine, it just has to stand in for the monitor that, when your students get out into the real world, will be really expensive and professionally calibrated every week like clockwork and is of such accuracy and consistency that the mere sight of its beauty makes a strong man weep.

excellent advice. thanks very much.

ill definately be purchasing a broadcast monitor and a consumer hd television for monitoring the output.

looks like ill be using an external blu ray device as well.

all this will run on fcp studio 3 and upgraded macs.

so for monitoring sd and hd which output card would be best?

thanks steve

I have an iMac G5 (1.25 GB) and using FCP 5.1. I'm working on a piece sourced from HDV tape. Is an upgrade necessary to complete the editing, compressing, output etc and would adding 2 GB do it, OR do I need to buy a new Mac with a dual core chip? I'm using a G-Raid 1T external drive to store media. Thank you.

Joan

It's not necessary for editing as such. It may be necessary for finishing depending on exactly what compressing and outputting you need to do.

Tom,

Thanks for your response -- good to know I can do all my edits. Re compression and output: if not possible on my computer, can edited/rendered media be transferred onto my external G-Raid and brought to an editing facility, to delay getting new equipment? Final product will be on Bluray. I'm a visual artist and a little new to video.

Joan

You can export a self-contained movie at high resolution and take that to another system. Depending on what platform and system is doing the compression and Blu-ray authoring will depend on exactly how you export it.