Hey, everybody-
It's been a while since I last posted, and it's great to see so many moderators! I have a question that didn't turn anything up in searches, and so I'm posting it here. If somebody knows of a thread that has addressed this problem, please point it out to me.
I've had a problem with outputting DV shows through my original Kona and now with the Kona 2 as well. I work in FCP 4.5, with two systems: a dual 1.25 G4 with a kona and a dual 2.5 G5 with a Kona 2. The drives, ram, etc. are all up to spec and my VAR (Dr. Rawstock in LA) is great. I'm on the current BM drivers for the Kona 1 and v1.0.1 for the Kona 2.
Because the same thing is happening in both systems, I am sure that this is not a peculiarity but rather a full-blown feature. What's the workaround?
On certain shots with saturated reds in them, (
http://www.fancyfilm.com/client/Kona_feature/red%20pants3.jpg and
http://www.fancyfilm.com/client/Kona_feature/red%20pants.mov for example) stripes appear in the red. Here is the bug: played through a DV deck, those lines and blocks disappear. But played through a Kona device, they are easily spotted.
Two things I have already found out are that: 1) this is a apple quicktime processing problem, and since the Kona relies on the mac's DV decompression, the flaws are carried out through the Kona's SDI. 2) Aja and BM Programmers don't pay much attention to DV, because professionals are going to use uncompressed codecs and the prosumer can handle imperfections.
But the problem in my little corner of the world (the world is made up of people's little corners, it seems!) is that many DV projects come to me for onlining to Digibeta. I don't, and in many cases can't, go back to the original tapes and digitize them through SDI. So what I end up giving back to people is, in some ways, inferior to what they've been seeing in their offline editing stations.
I've tried a number of fixes: uprezing the problem clips to uncompressed. going through aftereffects and recompressing to uncompressed there. putting the clips in uncompressed sequences and rendering them. using channel blur effects to minimize the problem. color keying and blurring just the red. desaturating the reds. Applying broadcast filters.
Can anybody shed some light on what's going on here? And can somebody give me a work around? Please post questions if I have been unclear on anything and I will try to be clearer. The clip I've posted is only a few seconds long, but I didn't want to overload y'all download-wise. I'd love for other people to take a crack at exactly what I'm working on. (Maybe even Blokes down under and Dudes in grass valley ;)
Thanks, everybody-
Bill
fancyfilm.com
