Edited 1080i 24pa How to output to HDCAM?

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dvInsight

Well-known member
I think this is an easy one.

Shot 1080i 24pa and edited in a 24 frame sequence in FCP 5.1.1. Now I need to export my movie so that I can have a post house transfer it to HDCAM at 1080i.

Do I need to add the pull down back in? Do I do it in my export settings? or simpler, do I just export the movie as is, put it on a drive and let the post house do it all?

That is what I would like to hear. Oh, and if they were open at this hour I'd ask them.

Thanks,

Rob
 
export DVCPRO HD or uncompressed self contained QT and put it on a firewire drive.
If they need to add pull down, let them do it. It really depends on where its going.
They have to lay to tape.
Or lay to DVCPRO HD tape with pulldown, and let them transfer straight to HDCAM deck.
Either way, no big worries.
 
Thanks,

I called them and they said the same thing. Which scares me. When someone says "no worries", It usually the start of the rabbit hole.

Thanks

Rob
 
Ok,

An update, the "no worries" turned into a 5 hour mini-nightmare at the post house. What should have been 30 minutes from hello to good bye to transfer two 45 second spots to HDCAM lasted the better part of a day and got shuttled around $100's of thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

The first thing they did was bring my team into a nice room and offer the normal drinks and snacks. They took our lacie drive to another room to load the clips in. We were in some sort of a "Qimage" suite. They said it can take any file and turn it into anything else. It was not the workflow that we talked about, but I thought maybe we were getting special treatment.

About 10 minutes passes and our operator calls the guy with our drive to ask why our stuff is not on the SAN (stored area network). He said it was and then our guy found it. He clicks a few buttons and we here our audio, but see no picture. Another phone call to the "other room" and the guy says he has to re-render our stuff. Well that is troublesome, but ok these guys are the experts. Another 15 minutes and know our audio plays perfectly but the video is running 2x as normal rate. This type of stuff goes on for another 30 minutes and I finally ask to know what is really going on.

So they decide to take me down the hall to the "computer room". Wow, lots, and I mean lot's of really expensive D5 Decks, Sony HDCAM decks, drive arrays out the wazoo type stuff with lot's of people working on the TV shows that we all see every day. We get to walk right past all of this to end up in small closet with a G5 Mac and couple of monitors hooked to it. They explain that they are exporting our DVCPRO HD stuff to uncompressed turning 45 sceconds into 6GB of data. Now I am worried.

So I ask why we just don't print to tape from the Kona Card they have installed, since that is what they said they were going to do originally when I called last night. Everyone looks around, shirks and then they give it a shot. Bam, it mostly works. It then appears correctly, but their SAN is jamming up and dropping frames left and right. Now understand hours are going by here, and the minute mode is long past.

They start bouncing stuff from partition to partition to get the speed up and it finally works. We have one of our two 45 second commercials done and on tape.

With out the gory details another 3 hours goes by before we have our second spot out to DVCAM. In the end, I don't think either partty learned anything. They could not tell us how to set up our quicktime files differently, nor explain what they did to make it work on their end.

The good news is that they only charged us for the 30 minutes that they had estimated. As to why we started in the Qimage room I'll never know. So now I am sure to always worry until the final product is in hand.

Thanks for listening.

Rob
 
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Yikes Rob,

Sorry you had to suffer through. Just to be sure, it's HDCam right? I assumed the DVCAM in your post was a Type-O. How did the spot look on good monitors? And how did the 24 vs 60 look?

Glad it all got worked out (even if the hard way).

-filmstox
 
HDCAM is right. The 60i stuff looked great. The 24PA stuff had the right cadance to it and had good motion blur, but it strobed or flickered on the Sony 34" HD CRTs.

So I am not sure what to make of it. Something seemed wrong, but multiple engineers said that is what it looks like on an interlaced screen, and that it should not appear on Costco Plasmas or LCDs. I don't really trust that at all.

The crew there seemed a bit clueless about putting the pulldown "back". So this stuff my not be right.

I don't have Barry's book yet, but I hope it has some sort of chart that says if you are here and want to get there, then here are the steps to do it.

Regards,

Rob
 
find another post house...
and did you output a uncompressed QT for them, or did you remain in DVCPRO HD?
Either way it should not have been that difficult.
 
I exported to DVCPRP HD, which was per their instructions. They then did the uncempressed. Yeah, I think a different post house is in my future.

I really liked them because they did an awesome job in telecine the week before.

--

Rob
 
I had a similar need. To take a 720p24 23.98 sequence and output it to HDCAM at 1080p24. And it couldn't have been easier.

Per their instructions I rendered out the timeline as a 10-bit uncompressed HD sequence...ON MY TIME, not theirs. As I didn't have a capture card I downloaded the AJA codecs and used them. Then I exported a self contained Quicktime Movie and transferred the file to an external drive (G-drive). I took that drive to the post facility and they copied it onto their SAN in 15 min (It was a 14 min sequence) and loaded it right up. They output that to HDCAM at 23.98. Couldn't have gone smoother.

I am guessing that your facility just didn't quite know what they were doing.
 
I asked my post facility why they said my DVCPRO stuff would be OK prior to going there, and they said they did this all the time. Since my spot was only 45 seconds it took about 5 minutes to convert at their facility to their SAN. The problem started when they took me to the Qimage room. It was only after being there for a while that they realized that they should have started in a FCP Room.

To their credit, they remained professional throughout the day, albeit embarrassed, and eventually got the job done. I think the biggest problem occurred because the tech that I discussed everything with was out the day of my session. Since this was a big Hollywood house, one tech should not have changed a thing, but in this case it did.

Luckily, it all worked out in the end.

Rob
 
Hey Rob,

glad to hear that it worked finally,
i am not totally sure, but maybe someone using EDIUS BROADCAST could test this: i think you can output each format you want, and i know that they have hdcam-otions as well, so maybe its possible to convert our hvx material with edius into hdcam!!??

Maybe not the perfect solution if you work on mac, but maybe an easy way to convert it..can somebody try this??
 
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