NLE Mac / Final Cut questions from 2002

[Jeff Donald]

I don't know of anyone doing captures with an iPod. You can boot from the iPod, so it's only a matter of time until you can capture to it. The newer 10 gig drive is a little more practical size wise. I think I saw something this past week that Toshiba (they make the iPods drive) is bring out their own MP3 player, but PCMCIA based and 20gig capacity. It will only be a matter of time now, until tape is a thing of the past.

Jeff

[Chris Hurd]

Vic,

FireStore product manager Matt McEwen has cc'ed me a copy of the e-mail he sent you. He is anxious to work with you to get your problem resolved. Have you responded to him yet?

[Jay Henderson]

unfortunately, the money i have for the feature is thin, and has to be spread across all departments (camera, lighting, sound, AND other expenses...food/lodging while in production, wardrobe, etc)...

what i'll probably do is:
1. shoot to mini dv tape
2. transfer footage to digibeta
3. input footage from digibeta into my mac (compressed, obviously)
4. edit
5. take master digibeta tapes and EDL somewhere where i can input the digibeta master footage uncompressed and compile it using the EDL (which was digibeta timecoded). then print a master on digibeta from the uncompressed digibeta that's on the computer....hopefully the hourly rate for doing this won't kill me.

i believe this is better than inputting the mini dv tape footage into my mac, then editing, then printing to digibeta. am i right?

as far as i can tell, this type of thing requires cinewave or digital voodoo.

p.s. bonus question:
what is the method for "taking the signal off the chips"
putting it directly into your hardrive, uncompressed.

[Jeff Donald]

I think you might be searching for the Holy Grail (or the religous artifact of your choice) of video. To the best of my knowledge no CODEC is available to take the data directly off the chip and into a computer. What NLE could read it? I read your previous post about seeing such a device. FCP, Avid, Premiere, etc all need a standard format that they can recognize (JPEG, MPEG, DV, DVCAM, DVPRO etc) so that they can manipulate the data. I don't see how they could do that with data off the chip. Sorry.

Digital is digital is digital. In theory, (a perfect world) taking data of your tape, into your computer and putting it back onto tape will result in zero loss of quality. It is digital all the way through. It is not a perfect world and each little component adds a little noise etc to your signal. This changes your signal and results in a loss of quality. However, the loss is so small, that if the signal is transferred carefully and with good components the loss will be negligable. Try a test, edit a couple minute piece on a computer and copy back to DV then copy to digibeta. Compare it to a direct DV to digibeta copy. The quality difference should be very little if any to the eye.

Jeff

[Jeff Donald]

Jay;

What part of Florida do you live in?

Jeff

[Jay Henderson]

i live in orlando.
thanks for the info. if you're in barnes and noble anytime soon, see if they have a copy of digital moviemaking by scott billups. on page 53, the picture of the "break-out accessory" can be found.
on the page before, he says, "For studio work, i often attach an RGB break-out box directly to my three-chip camera and feed the uncompressed RGB component signal directly into a Targa videographic board which digitizes, compresses and lays the video directly to disk. This method maintains a high level of color integrity..."

[Jeff Donald]

I will check the book, but I'm pretty sure I know what your looking for. Pro type broadcast cameras have a 26 pin out put. Among the various signals out put is an RGB signal. A very few, high end boards can accept RGB in ( the board on my old Avid had one). We also had a very high end encoder/transconder the would accept Betacam SP, S-Video, Composite and several other types of signals and converts them into RGB. We ran several subjective tests feeding the RGB signal from the 26 pin out put directly into the Targa board and feeding beta into the transcoder and looking at the results on broadcast monitors. The bottom line was we couldn't see a difference. My engineer told me that on a vectorscope he could see a difference in the chroma.

These type of devices are made and I believe Laird * http://www.lairdtelemedia.com/products/firewire.html#5000 * makes a decent one. The Targa board would take the RGB and convert it to the Avid JPEG Codec. The Avid software could then manipulate the data. When we went back to tape the transcoder would take the RGB from the Targa board and convert it to Betacam SP for masters.

Jeff

[Jay Henderson]

thank you very much. that's exactly the information i've been looking for...bottom line: it's not going to fit in my budget(s) any time soon, and i'm not missing out on anything for the kind of projects i'm doing.
as far as the book, it's a very good one if you're at my level of knowledge of the "digital cinema" enterprise. it does, however, seem to go in depth into some areas and stay shallow in others, which is frustrating.
thanks again.

[Jay Henderson]

if i want to shoot straight to a portable hard drive, using a laptop (instead of firestore), how much RAM and storage and everything else do i need on that laptop, just to get my footage past the laptop and into the hard drive? (i have a G4 at home to edit on).
i'll be using a pal xl1.
do these requirements change if i'm shooting digibeta/beta onto the hard drive? (i think they do, since it's more kbps).
another question: if dv can be stored at 13 gigs per hour of footage, what's the space/time ratio for "higher" formats, like digibeta/beta?
thanks guys.

[Jeff Donald]

I'm doing this from memory, so if I'm a little off, I hope someone jumps in and corrects me. Digital Beta SD is something like 30megs per second. This does not include audio. At the very least IDE RAIDS are required, something like 100 gigs per hour. Most operations would run SCSI, more expensive, but faster read/write. HD would require substantley more storeage and use the fiber optic SCSI.

The laptop is a great tool for capturing DV in the field. I know several shooters and producers doing just that with varying degrees of sucess. I would suggest the TiBook, the faster the better to get RT effects from FCP. The HOT internal drive is the 60GB drive with 5400 rpm speed. They only have 1 FireWire port. Some people connect a 7200 rpm portable and connect the camera to the drive. This configuration is getting mixed results. I think the more memory the better, 512MB would be the minimum I'd try. They support up to 1GB.

The little iBooks are not fairing as well. They are G3 processor based, so not as fast as the Ti's. Slower and smaller drives, less memory, slower bus, etc. etc. I think an iBook would make a good machine to off line on, but not well suited for capture of live video.

Jeff

[Steve Kim]

I am considering making a DVD for 30-minutes video in iDVD.

Does anyone know about how much time it will take for
encoding in mpg-2 and burning DVD-R in PowerMac 800Mhz, or Dual 1GigHz?

[Ken Tanaka]

iDVD is really a very good DVD burner and will handle the whole encode/burn automatically. In fact, the encode process starts as soon as you add clips to the project and continues in the background until completed. I've burned many DVD's with iDVD and, off the top of my head, I'd give the burn process less than an hour on a dual 1GHz. That is, start the burn before dinner and it will be completed by desert. The encode will take approximately the same time but will do so relatively unobtrusively.

[Jeff Donald]

Depending on the media you use, the Pioneer (Apple Super) drive is 1x or 2x in speed. On the older drives, the time may be affected if the firmware has not been updated on the drive. I get 2x speed with the Apple and Pioneer media.

Jeff

[Steve Kim]

Less than an hours for burning DVD-R for 30 min video in PM 1G dual is great!

Does anyone know any reliable brands for DVD-R media and reliable dealers?

I heard the quality in same brand could be vary because the real manufacture could be different even in the same brand.

I heard that Apple's DVD-R media has some quaility problems recently after Apple switched its DVD-R manufacturer.

Does anyone know the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R?
I visited tapesource.com and they have DVD-R and DVD+R.

[Matt Stahley]

i've had no problems so far with the apple dvd-r discs. i've read on apple support page abut earlier discs having errors etc. but i think this problem has been taken care of. also the older discs had either a red or green apple on the inlay not the blue( i could be wrong here) and as far as i know still the cheapest at 5 for $25.