Intensity shoot planning

[Abraham Lim]

Hey David, I finally am able to post a week after registering. May be a bit too late now, as I had to make some decisions right away because I am leaving for S.Korea next week. I am teaching film at a university and preparing to finish my indie film when I come back to the U.S. in June. I recently shot an internet series with the HVX200 and the first part of this movie was shot in Korea with the Varicam. I wish I could wait for your prototype disk recorder, but I can't.

So, after alot of research I've decided to spend my time on campus seeing if HDMI field capture is doable on a consistent basis. I have purchased an Intensity card and an Antec Micro ATX case with 300W power supply. I'm going to put a 2.66ghz core2duo processor, a 128mb Radeonx300 PCI-e x16 card and 2gb of ram. I went ahead and bought an Asus board that was recommended on the Blackmagic sight. If everything works out I'm going to shoot the U.S. part of my film with Canon or Sony HDV camera via HDMI capture in Neo to a QT mac codec. I'm going to try to use the internal SATA controller with a single 750GB drive for capture, since I am using the Cineform codec.

I expect there to be problems-
Sufficient power supply
HDMI cable length
Using a portable Video monitor instead of a computer monitor
Blackmagic bugs
PC>Mac conversion problems

I hope one of them is not realtime playback in Final Cut, because that will kill me. I've also read on the HV20 users forum that 24p pulldown removal was not consistent on live capture, but regardless I'm going ahead. And of course, I will post here as I make progress. If you have any advice for me before I leave, I'd appreciate it. Thanks to all on the board for all the great information. Wish me luck-

[David Newman]

These was a pulldown bug 4-6 months ago or about 5 days, totally fixed so 24p pulldown removal from a live source is not an issue. Sounds like you will do fine.

[Abraham Lim]

Originally Posted by David Newman

These was a pulldown bug 4-6 months ago or about 5 days, totally fixed so 24p pulldown removal from a live source is not an issue. Sounds like you will do fine.

Hey from Korea David. It took me a while because of a mismatch between motherboard and CPU, but today I finally installed the trial Neo HD program on the micro ATX system running Win XP SP2. I was assisted by a couple of students, one from China who are interested in using the Blackmagic HDMI/Cineform capture process for their films. We used a Sony HVR-V1 for the first 35 second capture to see if everything worked and it captured without a hitch. But I have some questions-

1. When you set up the capture mode, it asks for quality as merely LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH. Which setting is for the 8 bit lossless 4:2:2 setting? I chose HIGH assuming that was it.

2. After capture, we had a 23.98 QT.mov clip. This can be imported directly into FCS2, right? There is no need for conversion or export?

3. Should the V1 be set at 24p or 24A mode? The 24A mode apparently forces the first frame of the capture to be the A frame, so that postproduction tools can more easily extract the 24 unique frames in every 30 frames recorded. It would seem to be more friendly for pulldown removal, but I don't know what mode Cineform Neo prefers. There was noticeable stutter in the motion when I walked by the camera, but I need to do a more professional set up of the camera tomorrow before I can determine whether it was camera setting or 24p pulldown removal characteristics. I won't show you the clip, because it's just me waving my hands in front of the camera like a dufus.

4. I imported the clip in FCS2 and set the sequence settings to Cineform HD codec and when added to the timeline, it was realtime playback baby! But is there any way to monitor full screen output to an SDI/HDMI monitor? I seem to remember many posts about not being able to monitor out of the Intensity with cineform. Is that the same with FCS2 with a Kona card? Do you have to convert the clip to Apple ProRez 422 HQ to get an output?

Ok in 6 hours I'm going to shoot footage from the campus for longer durations. I will try to post these later. Next step is to acquire a small form factor keyboard and touchpad, a 7 " portable NTSC monitor to be used with the composite video out of my ASUS video card and some velcro.
I am ecstatic that after two weeks of the typically frustrating PC component assembly, the actual capture test worked. I actually had to clip off some of the PCI mounting bracket metal to get it to fit in the antec case. You think after all this time PC components would fit better. Anyway, thanks for always being around and I'll check back tomorrow.