DOsborne

Great, thank you for the feedback. I'll be sure to post what I end up doing along with any relevant comments.

I've often wondered the same thing about the made for tv look and have struggled to put my finger on it. some additional ideas/thoughts: 1. A lot of times, for me, it has to do with what's in the frame and not necessarily how the image is being captured. I feel like there are a lot of close-ups and tight shots in the tv movies that I've seen in order to hide the crappiness of a location or the lack of relevant set decorations. It seems like theatrical movies usually have a greater richness and depth to them becuase the sets and costumes and just things in general that fill up the picture, whether they're in focus or not. 2. I agree completely with Mark Douglas on the overabundance of flat, safe lighting, and the rim light comment, that's so true. Best of luck to you, David

Hello, I'm shooting a short project in June on Super16 and will ultimately like to have it transferred to uncompressed HD or 2K, preferably straight to hard drives. The following page about Bonolab, which does datacine transfers to hard drives, has me concerned. http://www.cinematography.net/digitk/digitk.htm Are there places that you all would recommend? Or any thoughts in general? Thanks!

Hi. I've grown confused while researching the HDCAM recording format. I originally thought that the compression ration was 4.4:1, but I've read in some places recently that it's 7:1? Also just to clarify the other specs are: 8-bit, 3:1:1 right? If the compression is 7:1 why does HDCAM have a higher bit rate than DVCPRO HD? is it something to do with 1440x1080 vs. 1280x1080? Lastly are there any opinions about how HDCAM holds up when printed to film? vs. DVCPRO HD? Lastly for real, is there a very apparent difference between an image captured in HDCAM and HDCAM-SR, like with an SRW-1. 440 Mb/sec and 10 bit YUV seems like a huge step up, is it worth extra cost? Any thoughts are well appreciated. Thanks!

Hey guys, thank you so much again. I've been looking at RAID setups and the miniG has really caught my eye. They have a 4 drive 2TB tower that, if striped can maintain a data rate of something like 600 Mb/sec. All that and it's just around $2,000. They also have smaller TB models for closer to $1,200. Also they look like baby G5's which is sort of cool. I'll need to get a PCI-X SATA card but hey, this isn't so bad! And Valeriu thanks for the codec recommedation.

Hi thanks for the feedback guys. I wouldn't have a VTR that's the thing, the "mamoth sized files" would be generated as the result of capturing the stream coming in from a camera like the XL H1, via the HD-SDI output. I understand completely that HD production, like film production, is an expensive business and I don't necessarily find it appalling that people at the student/independent level can't afford cutting edge technology but I'm trying to preserve the best image quality for my project with what I have. I don't have anything against finishing facilities, I'd love to be able to take advantage of working with some in the future but right now I really admire the work being done by the people at reel-stream, P+S Technik, Black Magic, etc. They spend time trying to innovate with what they have to get the best out of what they and we the student/independent producer have. I'm trying to do sort of the same thing, to a lesser degree and intellectual level, but I'm trying and the feedback that I get here is really helping me. So to clarify, my arguably over the top idea was to capture the HD-SDI stream from an XL H1, It doesn't have to be uncompressed but I want to avoid the Mpeg-2 compression process. I wanted to just get/acquire the large, mildly or uncompressed files, not to edit with them. I don't presume that dropped frames are that much of an issue when you just refer to the original files (the ones that would be pushing the limits of my system) for rendering/outputting (as opposed to playing them back RT), but I could be wrong, am I? I would edit "offline" by down-converting these files onto a different hard drive, with heavy compression and/or smaller dimesions. If my shoot takes place in two primary locations, a lot of interiors that don't require large company moves, then having my camera tethered to my computer wouldn't be quite as ridiculous as it would be in other situations. Thus, if I could capture the higher quality stream coming out the back of the XL H1, why shouldn't I? I'm presenting the final "film" at the NYU film festival and others where, if I get the post production grants I'm applying for, I could then ressurect those original files and have a finishing facility[!] (I'm not being facetious) help me prepare the material for film out or an HDCAM-SR master or whatever. SD video simply will not do at these and other international festivals. Sadly I can't originate on these mediums but I can preserve what I do get with minimal ammounts of compression. This is my goal. Would one of the "borderline" RAID set-ups listed above be able to help me acheive this goal? Thank you all again.

Ok so I've been thinking about getting a Decklink HD card. How fast of a hard drive would i need to capture 10 bit 4:2:2 uncompressed data? What about for 8 bit? I know that RAID set-ups are supposedly optimal but what about a single hard drive, are there any that are fast enough. But uncompressed HD files are huge. Yeah I know, dang it all, but what if i got a 500gb drive or something like two 400 gb drives, 7200 rpm, is a data rate of 150 MB/sec. good enough, for capturing that is. What I'm thinking about is capturing mamoth sized uncompressed files, or maybe mildly compressed files and then creating much smaller duplicates to do something like an offline edit, so I wouldn't need a disk array to blaze through a terabyte of my lame footage on a whim as I search for good takes., but it would be there once I'm satisfied with my editing decisions. How much is the cheapest RAID set-up? From what I've found 1.6 terabytes would cost me close to 3 grand, more than I paid for my dual processor G5 including the RAM upgrades and the monitor (granted i got a school discount but jeeeez).

Why couldn't Canon have a progressive scan option? Is that really a prohibitively expensive addition? I'm of the belief that HDV- Mpeg compression sucks but everything else about this camera is thoroughly desirable. The HD-SDI output is great; I could capture an uncompressed signal with a Decklink HD card or compress that signal with something like DVCPRO HD as it comes in to my computer. Drawback: the darn thing has to be tethered to my computer but I could take full advantage of the 1440x1080 CCDs and avoid subjecting the images to mpeg encoding. BUT, of course, the material getting pumped out of the CCDs is interlaced. BOOOO! Ok so here's a question. I'm livid that the HVX-200 has CCDs that belong on an SD camera and thus, suffers a horrendous loss in the resolution department. I love the idea of 1080p but not when it only seems (to one's eye and a vectorscope) to have only 540 lines of resolution (i base the evidence of this bizzare tyraid on the results from the 6 camera shootout that seems to be posted everywhere). It seems kind of like printing the output of my GL-1 onto IMAX film, after pixel shifting it of course which supposedly saves the day. So anyways back to that question... It's kind of a subjective question but whatever, would anyone see value in using the XL H1 for the sole purpose of tethering it to an HD-SDI card? If using a 50m cable this doesn't seem so bad. I really want a 24 fps look and a 24p final output to possibly print to film. Is the higher resolution of the canon worth the loss of progressively scanned images? Does the 24f nonsense look that bad when viewed progressively? I've seen some frame grabs where the interlacing is apparent but what do I know. I read a long thread in which someone named Shannon or Shelly who owned an XL H1 said the 24f looked really good and also that the interlaced data flying out of the imaging device was somehow pulled down and run through a 3:2 conversion to be written like 24p on the tape, does this data come out of the HD-SDI port? Meaning if I were capturing the HD-SDI output of the camera while in 24f mode would i be getting the data with 3:2 pulled-down info (assumedly repeated frames or whatnot) or would i be just getting straight 60i or 48i? Thank you all for your help. I'm producing my thesis for film school, shooting at the end of June and clearly, if this post gets timestamped, I'm losing sleep wishing I could afford a varicam, viper or f900 but trying to get the best that I can with what I have in hopes of not short-changing the potential of the story. Even I check out prematurely sometimes when I see something that looks crappy (or I should say, something that doesn't look like what I'm used to seeing at the cineplex/what i've come to associate with overall quality)

That is exactly what I'm thinking; shoot with the HVX, edit with the files from the p2 card (dvcpro hd), then output an uncompressed file for really the sole puspose as mentioned above by dgoulder and davidcox, to move it (the media) either to a post house color grading facility and/or film out place, and also to put away as a backup file of the completed picture. So I'm NOT editing with 4:4:4 10 bit files, it's just what I want to end up with, if that makes sense. I know that the "uncompressed file" that I'd be producing would never look any better than the DVCPRO codec upon which it was originated but it would be lame to reapply the DVCPRO HD codec again to the final output right? I don't want to expose my dear little project to that codec more than once(in the camera). Thank you to all.

Has anyone rented from LoneWolf rentals. They're the people with the yellow banner on the side of this page advertising HVX-200 rental for $550 a week. Seems to good to be true, wondering why.

I've searched high and low and can't seem to find data about how large an uncompressed HD file is. I feel like I've seen something about it in a previous thread but anyways my question is this: Shoot dvcpro hd, edit with FCP, and then move the edited sequence into a new uncompressed timeline to apply and render some mild color correction type stuff and output an uncompressed file for archiving, possible film out, whatever. Does this make sense? How large is an uncompressed HD file? I'd rather not go the route of $2 billion RAID and 300,000 rpm SCSI devices as I'm not editing with uncompressed files that need to be readily played back/scrubbed through, just outputted and saved. I'm looking to buy a new hard drive along the lines of a serial ATA 350-400GB drive with less than 8 ms seek time, is this enough? My "film" is going to be about 25 minutes long and the shooting ratio won't be insanely high. Thank you for your feedback!

So once you have done this, can you take the actual file from your scratch disk and duplicate it onto a DVD-R or an external hard drive for back-up? Or is the file still unrecognizable/unable to be accessed like a regular file?

Thanks to all, your responses are really helpful. I can totally see how color correcting on a plasma is risky, at best. I guess it will still be useful to monitor my edit on a big screen, which I'm really pumped about. And Keith, it's a philips HD monitor that doesn't display 1080p, only 1080i, 720p and a bunch of the different computer output resolutions, the biggest being 1366 x 768, 60Hz, which i now realize means that I will only be able to see my video appear on screen at about 720p resolution, right? Unless I can find a way to convert the computer output into a 1080i video stream, hehah which I guess is why people buy things like blackmagic. Oh man :P

I'm planning to edit a short movie filmed on an HVX200 (1080/24p) on my G5 with final cut pro 5. My question is this: If I use the second DVI output on the G5 (the one that's not connected to my main computer screen) to connect the computer to a good 10 bit 1920x1080 resolution plasma HD monitor using a DVI to HDMI cable, would that be high enough quality to do some simple color correction. It seems too good to be true that I could monitor full HD output without spending $9,999,999,999 on a blackmagic card or some such hardware. What am I overlooking?

Great, thank you so much for the help. This is a great forum, I'm planning on shooting with the HVX200 and a 35mm lens adapter so maybe I can offer some feedback about it in a couple months.