Capturing DVC Pro50

[Frank DiBugnara]

Can anyone speak specifically to the differences between capturing from a DVCpro50 deck into Final Cut when comparing FireWire and SDI? I've heard different things from different people. Is there a difference at all? Are you throwing away information during a FireWire capture?

[Michael Nash]

That's the first I've heard that, but I'm still catching up on codecs and such.

 

I can tell you though that I shot 10hrs. of footage on DVCPRO50 transferred into FCP via firewire and it looked gorgeous. I certainly couldn't see any artifacts that weren't there on the original tapes, and we did a fair amount of greenscreen.

[Keith Mottram]

Can anyone speak specifically to the differences between capturing from a DVCpro50 deck into Final Cut when comparing FireWire and SDI? I've heard different things from different people. Is there a difference at all? Are you throwing away information during a FireWire capture?

 

it is arguable that you are throwing away data by going sdi. firewire is sending the recorded data in its captured format to your nle. sdi is converting and, depending on the codec you use for digitising, upressing. unless for some bizaar reason you like the 'look' that sdi conversion gives you (and you'd arguably be hard pressed to notice) then keep the footage in its native format until you online. then uprez it, via software (or move the timeline) to an uncompressed format for post/ cc and output over sdi.

 

keith

[Joshua Reis]

Deciding between captuing via firewire (for DVCPRO50) or SDI (10bit Uncompressed) is really more of a workflow question. If you will be jumping right into heavy color correction in a 10bit sequence, can playback uncompressed 10bit media from a RAID or such,and can easily accomodate the eaxtra space - then SDI would be the way to go. Yes, capturing via firewire is a bit for bit copy of what the camera records,and thus there is no loss,while SDI does require a conversion. However, I did some tests a year ago where the hardware in the VTR did a better job of converting the material to uncompressed as compared to using software quicktime conversion (having quicktime convert DVCPRO50 to uncompressed). However, I'm sure software conversion has improved since then.Again, its more of a workflow issue. There are cards now that you can use with final cut that will allow you to edit in DVCPRO/ DVCPRO50 while giving a realtime SDI output for monitoring or recording to lets say DigitalBetcam.Back in the day, if you wanted output to a monitor while editing DV/DVCPRO50,you needed a deck with 1394 to loopthrough. Now, thats not the case. Regards.

[George Lekovic]

Hi,

 

Let me make corrections on my post above. I thought you were speaking about a different forma, and aa there is NO LOSS when going trough FireWire, an SDI 10-bit info would give you material in such format that it is better to work with, more forgiving, and less prone too artifacts then what you import via FireWire. And yes, it will require a lot of bandwith.

 

Altough, I was able to input 10-bit uncompressed NTSC via FireWire800. I have a RAID set-up too - but FW800 seems to work just fine...

 

Cheers,