how many images per second

I’m not sure I understand your question.

The VariCam does indeed capture 60 real frames per second. You need and FRC to play them back at a lower frame rate, or you can play the deck back at 50% speed.

You can select to shoot from 1 to 60 frames per second in one-frame increments; the recorder section always records at 60, so there are redundant frames captured for lower frame rates.

Hope this helps,
Leo

[ Ed Rudolph ] hi leo, thanks for the quick response. all i know about 720P is that yesterday a machine and a bunch of tapes showed up. we digitized this material into both an fcp system and a smoke and found 60 frames per second, but only 30 different images per second. does that mean that the frame rate on the camera was set to 29.97?

The problem/situation/issue is that Final Cut Pro does not like the way Panasonic handles timecode for DVCPro HD. Panasonic decided to run the timecode at 29.97 frames per second, and use upper/lower field flags in the timecode to distinguish between the 59.94 frames per second. This is not 100% standard, since 720p59.94 is "supposed" to have 59.94 time code.

Apple supports 720p59.94 only using that type of time code, and this is really the issue. It's rather strange that Apple don't care more about this issue, because it does not strike me as very difficult, really.

Pinnacle have a capture software called CineAcquire that comes with CineWave cards that correctly captures this type of material.


--rune