Re: FCP offline edit system for Viper/SRW1 project

Thanks for your suggestions, Mads and Mike - I've recommended that we purchase our own system and do the offline in compressed HD, but the director is now thinking about using the offline system that our equipment vendor has used for another Viper feature production.

The vendor is an HD production house in India (where we're shooting) that has a Viper, SRW1 (but no SRW5000), Baselight suite, and laser film recorder. Evidently on their last feature, they recorded the Viper at 24fps to the SRW1, downconverted to PAL, and somehow offlined in PAL at 24fps on a FCP system. I haven't heard any details yet on how exactly this was done.

I'm trying to make sense of this - I know that PAL is sometimes run at 24fps for standards conversion purposes ("slow PAL"), but I don't know how this would be implemented in a FCP project.

I'm guessing that they're playing back the 24fps HDCAM-SR tapes at 25fps out of the SRW1, then ingesting this into FCP through the standard def SDI out. I was under the impression, though, that the SRW1 didn't convert TC on the downconversion output.

Seems like with PAL offline, you'd want to shoot at 25fps (as Mads originally suggested). I don't really like the idea of a 4% slowdown on the final output, though.

Is this workflow that they're proposing commonly done in PAL countries? (acquire 24p HD, offline at 24p in PAL)

Thanks,

Derth Adams