Re: DVCPRO50 MADNESS

Cory,

At this point in time, you may be thinking to yourself..."I'm Crazy". No worries, you are not.

Here in Minneapolis 90%+ of the corporate work I've done is DV50. I ran into this same "problem" you're having. After 4 painful hours of trouble shooting I discovered this. You MUST capture the DV50 sources natively via Firewire. "Something" is happening when digitizing DV50 via the SDI input on the Kona card. I have a Kona 3. I'm guessing the card is not properly encoding an SDI image to DV50. Remember, an SDI input is 720x486. So if you digitize 720x480 DV50 or DV via thru SDI "something" is happening.

For your BetaSP sources, again, digitize them native. Meaning, Prores HQ or Uncompressed 720x486. When you cut them into your sequence make sure they're properly formatted for that sequence in the Basic Motion Tab. Send to Color, grade, render, send to FCP. I've made this work.

The only weird/frustrating/bizare thing about all of this is that this "solarization" thing only happens when clips are sent to Color and Motion. I believe it has something to do with how those apps process images on the GPU vs the CPU.

Also, transcoding your source to another format will not work. I tried that back in August. Your files are screwed, transcode or not. What I finally did to solve my problem was to Media manage, create offline and redig my show as 100% native DV50 via Firewire. I then sent to Color, imported my color corrections I'd already graded, hit render to ProResHQ, sent to FCP...all is normal again.

Sorry for the long winded explanation. Hope this helps.