1080/50i Tv commercial workflow

Mathew Knight

Mathew Knight

Active member
Hi there. I am shooting a TV commercial as my first HVX job. I have a workflow in mind that I will be testing soon. Its a pretty familiar workflow that is similar to what I have read about here. Just wanted to check if anyone see's any obvious holes in the plan.

-I live in PAL country so its 25P or 50i for simplicity sake (I know HD's not PAL or NTSC but we will delivery an SD PAL master).
-We are editing on Final cut pro (Final cut pro studio HD) running on a mac. (G5 blah blah..)
-the whole shoot is studio greenscreen.
-And we will probably shoot about 1hr of footage.

So here is my workflow plan.

1. Shoot 1080/50i. DVCPRO-HD Record to 2 x 8GB P2 cards. And also to FS-100 firestore.

2. The firestore will be the primary storage media and will go to the edit suite at the end of the day for transfer to the main drive at the final cut suit (1 terabyte raid etc)

3. Purely for backup (and possibly archive) we will transfer each P2 card (once it is full) to the PCMCIA slot on a PC laptop with an external hardrive. The laptop will have P2 Genie & P2 viewer. Assistant will do this while we continue on 2nd 8 GB card.

4. On the laptop we use P2 Genie to automatically transfer the entire card to a pre-made directory on the external harddrive (100-500GB drive, formatted on a mac with folders for cards eg Card 001, Card 002) The whole P2 card gets put into one folder.

? Will the PC (and P2 genie) recognize an external hardrive that is formatted for a mac ?

5. when the transfer from P2 card to external hardrive is done we use P2 viewer to check the footage on the external drive. If it looks good we use P2 Genie to erase the P2 card. then it goes back to the camera.

6. So we have duplicate footage on portable hardrive & on the Firestore.

7. Once we get back to the finalcut edit suite we need to get either the firewire drive or the external drive contents into finalcut.

?. At this stage I'm not sure what happens until we test it. But....

..can we just import all the folders (each P2 card shot) into final cut (File/import/panasonicP2 1080/50i) And away we go ?

-Do we need P2 log ?

I am am aware that one problem is that I can't use the undercrank/overcrank capabilities of the camera.

-Is there an easy way I can do this and still end up with a 1080/50i final cut project ? (Using P2 log ?)

The reason we are going 1080/50i is;

1. We have shot 1080/50i projects (on HDCAM) and run them successfully through this suite (so I figure thats going to be easiest).

2. We are shooting all greensceen so I want all the resolution we can get.

3. Final cut pro doesn't support 720/25p projects.

So no slo-mo for me ?

Anyway thats my basic idea. Any thoughts on simplyfying or fixing the process would be greatly appreciate. But no suggestions on 720/30p final cut projects. I need this process to be as simply as possible, with as little extra software steps as possible.

P.S I went to Barry Greens training seminar in Wellington, New Zealand and it was great. Thanks so much Barry for coming down.
 
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Q: Why shoot 1080 as opposed to 720 when your master will be SD?

My understanding was that most of the stuff in the seminar was 720 and looked insanely sharp and there was no real need to go to 1080 unless you were thinking film transfer or going to project the 1080 really big somewhere. But then again I hadn't slept for a couple of days before the bootcamp (editing).

Unless I'm mistaken, why not get some extra time on the P2 cards and lessen the damands on your post process?
 
Jack Daniel Stanley said:
Q: Why shoot 1080 as opposed to 720 when your master will be SD?

My understanding was that most of the stuff in the seminar was 720 and looked insanely sharp and there was no real need to go to 1080 unless you were thinking film transfer or going to project the 1080 really big somewhere. But then again I hadn't slept for a couple of days before the bootcamp (editing).

Unless I'm mistaken, why not get some extra time on the P2 cards and lessen the damands on your post process?
Click to expand...
I would be perfectly happy to shoot 720. But in the 50Hz camera we use in this part of the world final cut pro does not support 720/25p or 720/50p. Its fine for the 30p you guys use but final cut is screwing everyone else in PAL land.
I think there is a software fix via P2 log or something but I'm not going to do a 30P or 60P project in final cut. That just seems crazy to me in this part of the world (50Hz land).
But how can I shoot off speed frame rates ?
 
You will not edit in 30P in FCP. When using P2 log to import the footage you can edit in real 720p25 inside FCP. And the variable framerates also work.

With a keying project like yours I would definitely shoot 1080p25 for improved color resolution.
 
Mathew Knight said:
I would be perfectly happy to shoot 720. But in the 50Hz camera we use in this part of the world final cut pro does not support 720/25p or 720/50p. Its fine for the 30p you guys use but final cut is screwing everyone else in PAL land.
I think there is a software fix via P2 log or something but I'm not going to do a 30P or 60P project in final cut. That just seems crazy to me in this part of the world (50Hz land).
But how can I shoot off speed frame rates ?
Click to expand...
interesting ... learned something new, thanks :thumbsup:

(sorry I don't know the answer to your questions)
 
Anders Holck said:
You will not edit in 30P in FCP. When using P2 log to import the footage you can edit in real 720p25 inside FCP. And the variable framerates also work.

With a keying project like yours I would definitely shoot 1080p25 for improved color resolution.
Click to expand...
So you make can make a final cut project 720/25p and you can shoot the variable framerates at 720/25P (Not 25PN).
Will the 25PN stuff work on final cut if you import with P2 log.

So with P2 log you open stuff up then use the 'export to FCP XML'. And then final cut works fine on this footage ?
 
1080p25 and 1080i50 is supported "Out of The Box" in FCP 5.0.4 by using the built-in import tool, and can be done from all devices.

All formats that the HVX200E support can be imported thru P2 Log including 720P and 720PN. P2 log will strip duplicate frames (eg. if you record 720P50 at 25 fps with the Firestore) and will translate the right framerate to FCP on variable framerate shots.

Yes, you just use the 'export to FCP XML' function in P2 Log, instead of the 'Import>Panasonic P2' in FCP. Both will create QT files from the raw MXF data, and get metadata into FCP.

But only P2 log supports 720P and allows you to play the MXF files before the conversion to QT.
 
I also wanted to know. If I take an external hardrive that has been formatted to run on a mac. Can I plug that into a PC laptop and immediatly be able to select that drive in P2 genie to transfer my P2 card over to ?
 
If you want to use a Mac formatted (HFS+) harddrive on a Win Pc, you need to install the $50 Macdrive. It will install a HFS+ fileformat driver into the Win OS, so HFS+ disks will work like they do on in Mac OS X. (With hotswap etc.)

The Other option is to format as MSDOS on the mac using the disk utility. Which will create a FAT-32 filesystem that works in both systems, but has a filesize limit of 4GB which might be a problem if you use the disk as scratch disk in FCP....
 
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