Question on HDSLR footage conversion.

Odd question here. A director is asking me about some b-roll footage shot with no supervision out on the east coast.

The director is not very tech savvy and from his description of the situation I am guessing the footage was shot with an HDSLR, although
which one I don't know. The shooter sent a list of formats he could convert to but the list seemed odd to me in a way I thought
indicated the shooter really didn't know what he or she was doing.

So I told the director to just have the footage copied to a hard drive as is and we will figure out the conversion here.

Then the shooter came back and mentioned something about using a Canopus and that the 16:9 original files will be squeezed to 3:4 and
will have to be reformatted to 16:9 here.

Does anyone here understand why the footage needs to go through a Canopus and the files can't be simply copied to a drive?
Is this a particular and peculiar workflow for a specific camera?

The only Canopus boxes I see for sale on B&H are standard def only. So it sounds like he is bent on converting the stuff to SD even though
the show is HD.

Thanks for any information!

Unfortunately, with all of the information you gave, you didn't give the information that really mattered:

Exactly what camera did they shoot on?
How do you know it was tapeless?
If it was indeed tapeless, why are they converting the files to begin with, rather than sending you the originals?

"I am guessing" doesn't cut it. Get real, hard, confirmed information. Get on the phone with the East Coast and talk to the person operating. If he doesn't know what camera or format, ask him to describe the files. Send a screenshot of the file system. Anything but guessing.


www.derekmok.com

Hi Derek,
Yup, the chain of command was trying to arrange all this without communicating with anyone in post at all. The director further confused the situation in his description.

It turns out it's much simpler than what I was led to believe.

Turns out the shooter was just a guy from the agency shooting interviews for a test group. The format is HDV. It was a Canon camera. They don't know the technical well enough to communicate. What threw me was the mention of doing some kind of conversion through a "Canopus" and in the end my question boiled down to "has anyone heard of using Canopus in an HDSLR workflow."

I will find out the camera model and determine whether I need the camera for playback or can use a player.

Sorry for the false alarm. Go ahead and delete this thread if you like.