Editing SDX900 Footage

[xenocide4114]

:unsure:

 

OK, well i am pretty familiar to using film cameras, from arri's to Pana's and the work flow, yet my Cryptonite is HD/SD workflows. Can someone please tell me what are the Harddrive requirements for the best quality images from a SDX900. should i be getting a Terabyte Hard drive? Also what are the deck requirments for this system. Please help me, new to this camera and am looking for the bountiful expirience from the people who reside here. Thanks a bunch!!!

[T-Spect Le]

7 mb/s for DV50 Firewire xfer to FCP from a Mac. It's double to that of DV25. So an hour of footage on DV25 is roughly 13.5 Gb. For DV50, it'll be 27 Gb.

 

If you're not using FCP5, SDI (SMPTE 259M) workflow should be based on the quality of your favorite NLE card. DVCPRO 50 has a compression of ~3.33 to 1. So based on that, capture it at that ratio and you'll be OK. Anything greater than 3.33 to 1 capture is not recommended if quality is your top concern.

 

For deck, the cheapest now is the AJ-SD93, about $6.5K with out the SDI or analog option. It's not a frame accurate editing deck, but a very cost-effective feeder and final recorder. If you need full RS-422 TC batch capture via SDI or component, you'll have to get the analog option to make it work. The analog option card has the RS-422. Very tight cost control on Panasonic. The bare deck only comes with Firewire and composite. A fully configured AJ-SD93 will run you about $10K.

Edited September 19, 2005 by tspectle

[Tim J Durham]

7 mb/s for DV50 Firewire xfer to FCP from a Mac. It's double to that of DV25. So an hour of footage on DV25 is roughly 13.5 Gb. For DV50, it'll be 27 Gb.

 

If you're not using FCP5, SDI (SMPTE 259M) workflow should be based on the quality of your favorite NLE card. DVCPRO 50 has a compression of ~3.33 to 1. So based on that, capture it at that ratio and you'll be OK. Anything greater than 3.33 to 1 capture is not recommended if quality is your top concern.

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hi,

I'm about to plunk down a bunch of money for this same reason. The salesman tells me that what I want is a G-Raid external firewire 800 RAID. When I went to their website, it says this is really only for maximum 8 bit transfer. That would be fine when I'm shooting to tape. What would you recommend for when I'm capturing 10 bit which I believe DVC-Pro50 is if you record SDI-out from the camera to a deck?

 

Will an external FW RAID still do? Or is that overly ambitious? Thanks in advance.

[T-Spect Le]

FW RAID is good to have for any 10-bit uncompress SDI capture. FCP5 is mostly software only processing, so any hardware assist in the transfer throughput will improve the multilayer performance. It's not overkill for SD video and it'll be a good investment for other type of future projects.

 

 

Hi,

I'm about to plunk down a bunch of money for this same reason. The salesman tells me that what I want is a G-Raid external firewire 800 RAID. When I went to their website, it says this is really only for maximum 8 bit transfer. That would be fine when I'm shooting to tape. What would you recommend for when I'm capturing 10 bit which I believe DVC-Pro50 is if you record SDI-out from the camera to a deck?

 

Will an external FW RAID still do? Or is that overly ambitious? Thanks in advance.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I can't reccommend you try to connect a video RAID using firewire. Firewire was designed to connect cameras and single hard disks; I'm sure the latency issues will drive you nuts.

 

There's two ways to go with this. Either you use the DV50 support Apple has very conveniently put into their Firewire implementation and you capture it like that, or you do it as SDI. Bear in mind that if you've shot it to tape, capturing it as SDI incurs (minutely slight) loss, and will result in much bigger capture files, so I'd certainly look at just capturing the DV50 over firewire. To do this you won't need enormously significant amounts of storage provision, depending how much you want to store in terms of running time. A single conventional hard disk would probably do it, although if you want to keep the cost down I'd pick up one of those cheap serial-ATA RAID0+1 cards, and four drives. This would almost certainly do SDI as well.

 

The bigger storage solution, and necessary if you want to do multi-stream realtime work from an SDI source, would be a RAID-5 array using something like 3ware's 9000 series controller cards and five drives. This is considerably more expensive - the 3ware cards cost as much as a couple of big hard disks - but the performance is second to none and there is a lower storage overhead with RAID-5. Of course, you'll have to find somewhere to put five hard disks, but there's alternate chassis you can buy.

 

Buying a nicely-boxed external RAID is generally quite an expensive way to do it. You should not consider anything less than SCSI interfacing, and you may end up getting something like a Medea VideoRaid. This will be very much more expensive than the 3ware solution, though. I don't know much about X-raid, but given that it's a) a big box external RAID and B) marked "Apple Computer" I would expect it to be rather expensive.

 

Phil

[Gordon Highland]

That would be fine when I'm shooting to tape. What would you recommend for when I'm capturing 10 bit which I believe DVC-Pro50 is if you record SDI-out from the camera to a deck?

 

Correct, with the SDX it's pointless to capture higher than 8-bit, unless you go SDI straight out from camera head which is 10-bit for compositing or whatnot. Storage-wise, if you shoot 24p, capture over firewire and remove the pulldown it's only like 5.5 MB/sec. Avid now supports this as well as FCP. I don't capture to it, but I often edit from a regular ole portable Maxtor firewire400 drive with no problems whatsoever using this mode. For SDI and analog video i use an AJA i/o into FCP with no problems either (8- or 10-bit off of a second S-ATA drive in the Mac).

[Tim J Durham]

Hi,

 

I can't recommend you try to connect a video RAID using firewire. Firewire was designed to connect cameras and single hard disks; I'm sure the latency issues will drive you nuts.

 

Phil

I shoulda brought this up a month ago!

 

What I DID get was a dual 2.5 GHz G-5 with an external G-Raid firewire 800 drive. I guess I'll know soon enough if latency problems drive me nuts. I told the salesman that the whole shebang was coming back if it did. He seemed confident.m He also forgot to install the airport card so I gotta drive back out there and get it put in.

 

$#*&@+!@!#$%&^&!@! salesmen!

[MatthewG]

Yo! We have edited DV50 material for over a year on firewire 800 drives with no latency troubles...both a g-raid 800 , single lacie drives AND as a 2 drive firewire 800 raid 0 ( gotta buy seperate fw800 cards for seperate busses). We have had very few problems with the drives (okay, well 10.3 used to randomly delete the media off the drives, but OS updates have fixed that problem ;) ). Any issues we ever have are directory funkiness that Disk Warrior has solved (gotta love that app). We capture off a dvcpro50 deck via firewire, which really is the way to go. The idea of digitizing at 8-bit uncompressed from a dvcpro50 tape is really a bummer when Pani and Apple worked so hard to make the whole thing fast and small via firewire.

[Tim J Durham]

We capture off a dvcpro50 deck via firewire, which really is the way to go. The idea of digitizing at 8-bit uncompressed from a dvcpro50 tape is really a bummer when Pani and Apple worked so hard to make the whole thing fast and small via firewire.

These two sentences seem to contradict each other. Or maybe I just don't get the point your making? Is it a bummer? or is it the way to go?

[MatthewG]

you just don't follow. the point IS digitizing dvcpro50 at 8-bit uncompressed is a bummer, when it was designed to come in via firewire at DV50 (which doesn't compress or recompress, its just a data transfer and a fairly small one compared to 8-bit uncompressed). what I am saying, in response to "how do I edit footage from an sdx-900 effectively" is: get a dvcpro50 deck with a firewire output. word up.

[Tim J Durham]

you just don't follow. the point IS digitizing dvcpro50 at 8-bit uncompressed is a bummer, when it was designed to come in via firewire at DV50 (which doesn't compress or recompress, its just a data transfer and a fairly small one compared to 8-bit uncompressed). what I am saying, in response to "how do I edit footage from an sdx-900 effectively" is: get a dvcpro50 deck with a firewire output. word up.

Yes, I didn't follow. <edited for snarkiness>