Capturing HDCAM & HDV in FCP 5.1.4
Hello Folks,
Looking for help in a particular area of HDV expertise.
First I'll go over the system and then the problem.

Mac Quad G-5 - 2.5 Mghz w/4.5 gigs of RAM running 10.4.8 OSX
Internal drives 2-500 gig ATA
2 external Firewire Drives both 1.25 Trbytes

Final Cut Pro 5.1.4
Kona 3 Capture card

We are successfully capturing HD footage shot with Sony HDW-730 through Kona 3. All codecs are known, located etc.

Through the SONY HVR-M15U we are trying to capture HDV shot on the Canon XL-H1 and Canon HV-10. Last November, Don Desjardin (certainly known on this forum) came up to Montana we did some shooting and had no problem importing the footage straight away to the hard drives.

In looking at the Information column (Command -I) we see that this was Captured using an Apple HDV 1080i60 Integer (Big Endian), timecode setting.

Now we are seeing that in the Kona settings as well as directly in FCP that the HDV 1080i60 setting appears to have vanished.... We have tried several -but not every setting so far- but are not finding the same results where spectacular XL-H1 shots were imported at 1920x1080... Please Help!

We have to match this footage up with HDCam and thought all was well....

Thanks for Any SAge wisdom,

Tim Barksdale
Birdman Productions
Choteau, MT

Hi Tim,

I just finished working on a show where we mixed HDV from the JVC JY100 and DVCProHD with a similar setup to yours but with a Kona2.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean that the HDV settings have vanished?
Also when you say that you captured the footage from the XL-H1 to hard drive did you do that via firewire or HD_SDI?

If you captured via FW it would be 1440x1080 [not 1920x1080] and you'd have to re-encode to match your Sony HD timeline.

Hi Chuck,

We are going to look at this is great Detail today. Yesterday we were still logging, so it was not a pressing issue. Today we will finish logging and thus I must put on my techie hat and figure this out....

It would be killer if we can do it all straight through the Kona 3. Any suggestions on this will be attempted as it totally beats going throught the firewire port directly to the G-5.

I'll post success or be whimpering if a failure...

Tim

Ok we got the thing solved ourselves. Inhopes that this may help someone else down the line I'll post our process.

First the VTR SONY seemed to be displayingthe HDV fine into the deck Monitor which is an SD Sony Field
But we kept getting indications that nothing was happeing in communication with the G5. So. First thing I did was to go into the deck control menus. Under the HDV/Dv settings I noticed several things had slipped back to factory default settings. This may have occurred while being unplugged for about the past 5 months ( sequential shoots: Ecuador, Florida, Colorado, then Alaska).
After getting TC and HDV settings corrected we then went back into the G5 and Kona 3 Audio/Video settings and spent some time going through presets, capture settings, and audio settings.
then we put in tape and began to fine tune the settings. We found the special Sony HDV Firewire setting and one of the keys was in the preset area where the long searched for 1080i60 HDV setting had been freed or was magically there. We could just have well missed it for some time as we kept thinking it was in the capture settings menu.

So now we have deck control, Stereo Audio, 1920x1080 capture and LIFE IS Good! Took a few hours and some minor panic at times. But with determination and patient plodding you can work miracles! Now if I could just turn back the clock a few years....

All my Best,


Tim Barksdale
Birdman Productions LLC
Choteau, MT