FCP HD and the Varicam
by Noah Kadner
on
Apr 24, 2004 at 1:05:28 am
Hi folks-
Just wanted to post a few words as I was running the demos of the new 1200A DVCPROHD Firewire deck at NAB. This thing rocks- works exactly like a standard DV deck for edit, capture and timeline playback in FCP HD only you get to work with native Varicam footage.
The Frame Rate Converter plugin works well- I got to play around with a beta version. It handles all frame rates the Varicam shoots and will conform them to 23.98 and 60(and one other framerate though I'm not sure what it was.) The conversion is done on a clip by clip basis by selecting a captured clip in the browser. The plugin shows up in the Tools menu of FCP HD. In other words- you don't need the FRC anymore to get your Variable frame rate shots out. All you need is FCP HD and the 1200A deck.
Noah
PS- Rune is a very cool dude in person and has a lovely partner over at Simplemente. :)
Re: FCP HD and the Varicam by Nate Caplin on Apr 25, 2004 at 2:57:07 am
Noah,
Thanks so much for confirmation of this! I stopped by your demo at NAB on Tuesday and talked to you briefly asking about this, but never got to see the plug-in in action. I heard, though, from several sources that it existed in beta and was due to be released within a few weeks.
So, then, it looks like my predictions from January were correct!
---
Nate Caplin
Manager of Webcasting and Streaming Media, American Electric Power, Columbus, Ohio
Re: FCP HD and the Varicam by Monica Reina on Apr 26, 2004 at 6:48:07 am
Hi Noah,
Thanks for the "lovely", unless you were talking about Oyvind...the other Norwegian from Simplemente (lol). It was also very nice to meet you at NAB, it was totally cool to see how much the presence of FCP has grown at the Panasonic booth from last year to this year. You were doing a great job at the booth and the only thing that I regret is that we didn't have enough time to show you more of the stuff that we have been doing with the VariCam down here.
:)
We are trying to get a 1200A Deck over for our big event with Apple Latin America and Panasonic Mexico on May the 11th. As you have been lucky enough to be working with it for 4 days we will be probably asking you some questions while we manage to get one down here.
Re: FCP HD and the Varicam by Mike on Apr 26, 2004 at 12:53:22 pm
Any change that the FRC plug-in will be available to us mortals anytime in the not-so-distant future? Is this a free plug-in, or will we have the option of a $20,000 FRC box or $20,000 FRC plug-in.
Re: FCP HD and the Varicam by Jason J Rodriguez on Apr 26, 2004 at 2:47:46 pm
I thought the Pansonic rep said that it'd be a free download off the Panasonic site in a couple weeks. That was at the FCPUG meeting on Wednesday night.
Re: FCP HD and the Varicam by Mike on Apr 26, 2004 at 7:48:49 pm
I'm guessing that's at 24 fps. So, I assume that 60p would realistically be 30-40 MBps? That makes it less than 1 GB per minute. And Firewire can do 400MBps!?!?! Less than a GB per minute?! Or am I gettng my bits and bytes confused.
Re: FCP HD and the Varicam by Rune Hansen on Apr 26, 2004 at 8:10:32 pm
Mike.
It's very simple to understand, really.
DVCProHD is running at 100 Mbps (MegaBITS per second). FireWire 400 is 400 Mbps (MegaBITS again). Harddisk speeds are typically measured in MegaBYTES per second.
Anyway, the 100Mbps figure is at 60 frames per second. QuickTime reports 720p24 DVCProHD files as being 5.4 MB/sec (MegaBytes per second). For 720p60 and 1080i60 files in DVCProHD, QuickTime reports them as 13.9 MB/sec.
You can do this easily from any harddisk, basically.
