HD Suite Essentials

E

eppdidit

Well-known member
I am struggling to decide what essentials I am going to need to shoot and edit with HD! With the new format comes the painstaking decisions of what to get and what NOT to get...especially on a budget.

I will probably go "bare bones" until I can afford to get some bigger toys, but for the meantime I would like to hear from some of you what type of products we will need to get us off and running and what products you suggest will help us get off the ground.

I currently work on Mac dual 1.8 and at this is what I'm thinking about purchasing:
HVX200 (obviously)
Blackmagic's DeckLink HD Card
30" HD monitor from Gateway
HD Firestore Drive
Possibly a DVCPro Deck for playback, but not sure which deck to buy (any suggestions are appreciated)
 
Not sure about the card.

Not sure about the card.

I'm not sure you need the Decklink card, especially if you get a DVCPro deck. As far as I know, the cheapest DVCPro HD deck is the HD1200A, and it communicates over Firewire (although that is an extra-cost option, which is lame). You don't want to be going back and forth between SDI and DVCPro, because you'd be recompressing needlessly.

As far as I can see, the only reason you'd want an SDI card in your computer (beside capturing from non-Firewire sources) is to maintain the best fidelity if you took DVCPro footage (that you captured over Firewire) and did some effects on it in an uncompressed timeline and wanted to write it out to HDCam or some other non-DVCPro format.

If you're going to archive your finished work on DVCPro tape and not retain uncompressed color-corrected or composited footage on backup tapes or hard drives, you might as well skip the Decklink and just run a copy off through the SDI output of the HD1200A whenever you need one.
 
By the way, in the "cost of storing HD footage" thread, Barry makes some good arguments for using tape-backup devices instead of a deck. And it's true that even the HD1200A is still over $20,000. I haven't looked at the prices or capacities of tape backup lately, but they're bound to be way lower. And by the time you use up $20,000 worth of backup tape, terabyte hard drives will be $100 each.

I still don't know what you'd do with the Decklink, because without an HDCam deck, you'll probably be taking your files somewhere to have an HDCam tape made if you need one. I don't see an SDI broadcast-style monitor on your list, which is the only other thing I could see using the card for.
 
I'm trying to figure all this out myself right now so I can't offer much, but I'd like to find out where you found the Gateway 30" monitor. I just went to Gateway and can't find it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top