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RonnieoftheRose · Jan 5, 2005, 06:42 AM

I'm currently putting together a medium budget film project which I want to shoot digitally. Post production will also be done entirely digitally based on Apple's recommended set up. This is the set up I will be investing in.

Power Mac G5 Dual
23 inch Studio Display
XRaid with 8x7200RPM drives
XServe single CPU 2Ghz with Fibre Channel PCI-X card
XSan for the XRaid
Fibre Channel/Ethernet Switch
Full Apple Studio with Final Cut HD, Motion, Shake, etc
Photoshop CS
Cinewave HD to capture and print from/to HD tape 1080 24p

What's left to choose is the best possible HD-CAM that is capable of 1080 24p and is compatible with the Cinewave HD card and Final Cut HD. If you could recommend one based on specs or experience please be free to suggest.

Thanks.

dlefebvre · Jan 5, 2005, 08:01 AM

I would rule out HDV from the start as it is more a prosumer product. It uses mpeg2 compression and it is not considered as a broadcast format. If you're serious about this, then expect to pay more for the camera than youre whole system. Broadcast equipment is very expensive.

My guess would be DVCPRO HD. A very good quality/price/performance choice. FinalCut is optimized to natively deal with this format. it's a 100Mbit/sec as oposed to the 144Mbit/sec of Sony's HDCAM (DVCAM is about 25Mbit/sec). Panasonic offers good 1080 24p camera in the range of 50 to $60 000. So the best bet is to probably to rent the camera when needed and buy a deck. The VTR should be a litlle less expensive. Anyway, you would probably not be abale to capture or output to tape using the camera. One advantage of DVCPRO HD is that you would not need the cinewave HD as you can use it natively through Firewire (it's supposed to handle 400Mbit/sec).

The only other serious choice is Sony's HDCAM. It's a better and more expensive choice. Once again you will not be able to capture or output from/to the camera. A sony 1080 24p camera is close to $100 000 and a deck is a little less expensive. There is a few decks like the J3000 that are worth checking out.

Renting is the best option, unles you want to buy it and rent it to other while you are not using it. It's a way to finance your equipment. To rent a HDCAM 24p camera you would pay around $4000 a week and about $2500 a week for the deck. To rent a DVCPro HD camera you would pay about $2500 a week and about $1200 a week for the deck.

RonnieoftheRose · Jan 5, 2005, 10:40 AM

Thanks for the quick reply. HDCAM's are what I meant. I get the terminologies mixed up with all the new stuff that comes out. Currently I'm thinking of the Sony or the Viperstream. The latter is proprietory so I'm not sure if it will ever work with Final Cut HD. The quality is excellent but the cam expensive. I will be renting that camera equipment but buying everything else I listed for future reuse.

Something in the range of 144Mbit/s would be ideal as I need as much detail as possible without resorting to film. Also, ideally a camera that is very forgiving in natural light and low light conditions as I don't want to use too much artificial lighting, and will blow up on to film without any obvious artifacts. I would also like as much in-camera color control.

dlefebvre · Jan 5, 2005, 07:33 PM

The 144Mbit/sec is the Bitrate of the HDCAM compression. Because it is compressed. Panasonic's D5 HD decks offer a 270Mbit/sec bitrate and Sony's HDCAM SR offer a 1.4Gbits/sec bitrate trought their 4:4:4 Dual link output.

FinalCut wont support the native HDCAM codec but you won't have any problem using the HD SDI output of the deck trough the Cinewave HD card. FinalCut will then deal with Cinewave's codec. You should have a very good result. Good enough to be blown to film afterwards. It's more than important to work in 24p from shooting to final output to avoid 3:2 puldown an pullup interpretation.

As far as the Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream camera, I'm not too familiar with this one. I only know it records uncompressed raw 2k frames. So we are talking about close to 10Gb of storage for 1 minute of footage. I highly doubt FinalCut can deal with this at the moment. So unless you're ready to deal with doing the offline on your system and then pay a service house to do the final conform (without counting the conversion of the raw files to a format FinalCut can deal with), HDCAM is a more practical and less expensive solution. A friend of mine shot a film in HDCAM and I saw the final product on 35mm in a theater and it looked great. I would definitly go that way.

brianb · Jan 5, 2005, 08:37 PM

I would second the Panasonic Vaircam HD Camera. I think this a great Camera. With everything on the full rig winds up being about $100,000 You can rent the system for around $1200 to $1500 a week. This is a great camera and the 60p frame rate that it records at gives you great possiblities to speed up and slow down your footage later with no problems.

RonnieoftheRose · 04:21 AM

Originally posted by dlefebvre:
The 144Mbit/sec is the Bitrate of the HDCAM compression. Because it is compressed. Panasonic's D5 HD decks offer a 270Mbit/sec bitrate and Sony's HDCAM SR offer a 1.4Gbits/sec bitrate trought their 4:4:4 Dual link output.

FinalCut wont support the native HDCAM codec but you won't have any problem using the HD SDI output of the deck trough the Cinewave HD card. FinalCut will then deal with Cinewave's codec. You should have a very good result. Good enough to be blown to film afterwards. It's more than important to work in 24p from shooting to final output to avoid 3:2 puldown an pullup interpretation.

As far as the Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream camera, I'm not too familiar with this one. I only know it records uncompressed raw 2k frames. So we are talking about close to 10Gb of storage for 1 minute of footage. I highly doubt FinalCut can deal with this at the moment. So unless you're ready to deal with doing the offline on your system and then pay a service house to do the final conform (without counting the conversion of the raw files to a format FinalCut can deal with), HDCAM is a more practical and less expensive solution. A friend of mine shot a film in HDCAM and I saw the final product on 35mm in a theater and it looked great. I would definitly go that way.

The FilmStream was used to shoot Mann's Collateral which if you saw printed to film very well. Problem with digital footage printed to film stock is that sometimes there can be a lack of depth to the images. It also outputs 4:4:4 at very high bitrates which means it captures footage to a proprietary disc system. Tape can't handle that much data yet. I certainly will keep it 24P all the way. I'm not going to bother with pulldowns or pullups. It's a waste of time with what's available now.

I'll probably have to go for something like the Panasonic AJHDC27V once a 24P/1080 version is available or something with equal or better specs. The current model is 720 -25/30/60. Not enough detail, too much interpretation work. The Sony F900 looks attractive too. It already handles 24P but apparently it's not easy to use.

RonnieoftheRose · Jan 6, 2005, 04:19 AM

Originally posted by brianb:
I would second the Panasonic Vaircam HD Camera. I think this a great Camera. With everything on the full rig winds up being about $100,000 You can rent the system for around $1200 to $1500 a week. This is a great camera and the 60p frame rate that it records at gives you great possiblities to speed up and slow down your footage later with no problems.

I won't be doing any speed ramping. Just clean and attractive photography. Nothing to distract from story and acting.