Getting HDCAM onto my G5 via FW?

[Mike Plonsky]

Hi. We shot some amazing aerial footage in HDCAM 1080 25P last week with the Cineflex System on a helicopter. My question is regarding how to get this HD footage onto my G5 in FCP (DP 1.8GHz, 6GB RAM).

The final delivery format for this project will be SD on DVD, so the simplest solution would be to take the 2 hours of HDCAM tapes to a conversion house and have them downconvert it for me to miniDVcam and then capture the DV via FW but I´d prefer to get the orig. HD footage on my G5. This would allow me to zoom in and crop without noticable pixelization, I imagine (like film), but I´m not sure if it´s even possible to get the HD onto the G5 without a special card (which I don´t have).

A rental facility suggested I rent their Sony J-H3, which reproduces HD and has a FW out, but I´m doubting it´ll ouput HD via FW. Am I correct? Can anyone offer any other suggestions? Will it be worth the hassle or should I just get the tapes converted to miniDV and play with the HD footage some other day.
Thanks a lot.
Mike

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

JH3 will output timecode matching DV. You can capture via SDI, edit with the DV proxy, and replace the DV with HD when ready to finish your post.
You need a Kona, Bluefish, or BMD card to ingest via SDI, but your machine may not be equipped to handle that large of a stream.

[Mike Plonsky]

Thanks for the quick response!
Just to clar¡fy, are you saying the JH3 will let me capture DV via FW? And that if I want SDI I´d need the right card? What else would my G5 need to handle the ingest of SDI? It´s got a 400GB SATA media drive and a 250 GB SATA boot drive.
Also, would you recomend any particular cards if I were to make the investment? Like the DeckLink HD Extreme, by Blackmagic?
Tks again!
Mike

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Originally Posted by Mike Plonsky

Thanks for the quick response!
Just to clar¡fy, are you saying the JH3 will let me capture DV via FW? And that if I want SDI I´d need the right card? What else would my G5 need to handle the ingest of SDI? It´s got a 400GB SATA media drive and a 250 GB SATA boot drive.
Also, would you recomend any particular cards if I were to make the investment? Like the DeckLink HD Extreme, by Blackmagic?
Tks again!
Mike

Yes, the JH3 downconverts to DV on the fly via firewire.
I'm a big fan of BMD cards, but the Kona products are great too. Very limited experience with Bluefish, but I'm confident it's good stuff. These days, it's all pretty good.

[Glenn Chan]

What else would my G5 need to handle the ingest of SDI?

You need a hard drive array. [edited by moderator for links]
The easiest solution would probably be a 14-drive XSERV RAID + FC card for your G5. There are cheaper alternatives.

--The hardware cards need a specific kind of PCI slot (PCI-X I think, not PCI or pciE). I can't remember which G5s don't have them... you might want to double check that just in case. I don't follow this stuff that closely.

2- You might be able to get someone else to capture HD, and then transfer the captured file onto a firewire drive. I don't know if that's necessarily a good workflow, since transferring the file will take time. Playback won't be real-time without a drive/RAID array. You could use media manager to convert the data files and offline/online, but then it's getting convoluted.

Another option would be to work off downconverted copies... and re-capture particular HD segments if you find it's necessary.

[Mike Plonsky]

[QUOTE=
Another option would be to work off downconverted copies... and re-capture particular HD segments if you find it's necessary.[/QUOTE]

I think this is going to be the simplest move for now, given the time constraints and the hardware requirements you've mentioned. The only downside is not being able to recapture in the same timecode for future use of the HD but that's probably not that big a deal for now.

BTW my G5s have PCI-X. Thanks for the other forum recomendations. I'll check them out.

Que viva DVi!
Mike