Digital Anomolies with FS-100

T

tpouyer

Member
I saw this for the first time today. I have done several hours of footage with the fs-100 and the hvx set at 1080i24pa and the footage looked great until this morning. I was filming some interview shots and brought them into my FCP to remove the pulldown ( done with cinema tools ) and saw these wierd abnormalites appearing every now and again. There does not seem to be any pattern to it and it was on the original DVCPROHD file as well as the new file spit out by cinema tools. I can't explain it other than it must have come from either the camera as it was spitting out the footage over the firewire port or possibly the fs-100 drive caused it when it was recording the stream to disk. I don't know and I am hoping that maybe someone here will recognize it and let me know what I can do to fix it.

Here is what it looks like. It only appears in a single frame and only at random throught the footage.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pouyer/144170749/
 
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If that was on tape, we'd call that a tape dropout. Looks like there was a bit of bandwidth congestion or something during the transfer. When you play it back from the FireStore into the camera, does the glitch show up?
 
FS-100 Playback

FS-100 Playback

Well, I can't test that. I no longer have the footage on my FS-100. Once I pulled it over I review the first 2 or 3 minutes of it and didn't see anything like this so I formated the fs-100 drive in preperation for another shoot that was comming up a little later that day. I guess from now on I will review the entire clip before reformating the drive.
 
YIKES.
I was planning on renting a FS for a shoot later this month....maybe I'll stick to streaming over FCP.
 
This looks more like some of the stuff I have seen in transfer to FCP. Too bad you know longer have it on the Firestore. It might be worth checking to see if you can move it back to the P2 store and see if the camera can repair the clip. Not sure that it can, but to try make sure it goes back over just like it was organised when it came off the Firestore, contents folder and such.

Again, I haven't played with it enough to know if this is possible. I know it can be done on the P2 card. Anyhow, good luck.

Best,

Jan
 
Hi,

I can't say we have seen anything like this before. We are investigating in our lab now. I know you have mentioned you were shooting in 1080i24pa mode, but if you had any addition information about your setup, that would be helpful (such as FS-100 control mode, Cinema Tools version etc.)

Thanks,

Matt McEwen
Focus Enhancements
 
So here is my question for you, did you transfer the footage off of the firestore to a file on a hard drive before importing or did you import to FCP directly? If you transfered first, then try this. Do a update on the Apple, at the Apple site. Reboot the computer and then re-import. Do you have the same problem?

Best,

Jan
 
FS-100 1394 Dropout Issues

FS-100 1394 Dropout Issues

No I didn't transfer the file to my hardrive first. I imported the files directly into FCP from the firestore. I kept the original imports even after I performed the reverse telecine in cinema tools though and the dropout frames are present in that footage. Too bad that those frames did not land on the extra interlaced frame that was being pulled out in the reverse telecine process :-( I guess I'm just not that lucky! By the way my camera was set up like this:

Recording Mode:
1080i24pa
1394 EXT control
CineLike D
Detail Level +2
V-Detail Level +2
Detail Coring +3
Master Pedestal -2

And my Firestore:
DVCPRODHD REC
P2
Local Control
 
I am going to go on record here and I really hope that it saves some of you guys in the future. Think about the MXF files, the Content Folder as your MASTER footage. This should be what is in your archive. Always take care to have this intact somewhere before you erase footage off of the P2 card or the Firestore.

I fully believe that this anomaly is due to import problems and not the Firestore it self. I have seen the same coming off of P2 cards. Once the user redid the import from the file transferred to the HDD, the anomaly went away.

So part of your workflow should always be to first transfer the footage off of the P2 Card or the Firestore to and HDD and always keep it intact. You can look at at it etc, before you transfer it, but never erase the file until you have a cloned copy of it. Then if it imports badly you have a place to backup to. Sort of a built-in plan B.

Hope this helps,

Jan
 
Jan is so right.. im really starting to look into LTO or DLT as a backup.. just raw file structure backups.

Its kinda like in the old days when we would capture from tape, sometimes you would get some sort of odd dirty head glitch and have a fizzle in a capture, you would go back and recapture that part of the tape again and sometimes it would work.
 
I have experienced this exact problem as well -- shooting in 720P/24P. I did not back up my MXF files, unfortunately -- partly because they take up 2.5x as much space, compared to the converted QT files that FCP creates....... which, apparently, are the root of the problem. Major drag.

Is anyone alerting Apple to this, or working with them to resolve this in FCP?

Kyle
 
Surely this is the FW bus firmware issue that was fixed with the first update from Focus? I had this exact sam issue and undated my FS100 with the new firmware and it has not happened since. There have been too more firmware updates since and they have all improved the unit.

I'm surprised Matthew does not mention this, although this thread does go back a bit.

Go here to update your FS100 firmware. Make sure to follow the instructions very carefully.
 
Kyle, what version of FCP are you using? There are some serious issues with 720p24 media in FCP versions prior to 5.1.1.
 
My 2 cents.

I've experienced similar issues and re-importing into FCP fixed the majority of it. It is key to have a fast drive and make sure the FS and drive are not hot! Believe me, I've found that either or both being too hot will cause isses. And to Jan's comment of treating the FS100 files as Master footage....I agree. BUT, think of the massive amounts of harddrive space this takes up. I've just built our second 2.5 terabyte Raid as we've filled the first one up backing up, archiving etc. In the future, there has to be a time-efficient, cost-effective way to archive these original files without using valuable edit-capable hard drive space. This whole process with the camera and accessories, Firestore and it's accessories, FCP recording to raids, raids to archive and on and on has me into the nearly 40 thousand dollar range (not including the edit system) and I still need more stuff. Granted, it's still cheaper than buying a Varicam. Having to sacrifice my hard drives is painful. And truthfully, tape backup is archaic at best.

Don Wilson
AmericanaMediaInc.com
 
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