Cheapest way to HDCAM deliverable?

[Shawn Nelson]

Thinking ahead here: I make my first few Red shorts and one turns out to be decent so a festival wants it and they take HDCAM as a display format. (Like the Bend Film Festival, the Oregon version of Sundance). What would be the most cost-effective way to get someone to make me an HDCAM master from a finished FCP export? I sure don't want to buy an HDCAM deck but I'd love to be able to deliver my Red shorts to festivals and HDCAM tape seems to be the growing preferred format.

[Ralph Oshiro]

Well, if you were in L.A., my partner just bought a few HDW1800 HDCAM edit recorders. We plan to offer HDCAM recording rentals in the L.A. area as soon as we launch RED411.net this summer.

[donatello b]

i sure hope HDcam isn't the next accepted ( masses) format ....
a friends short played at TriBeca film fest ...
original - 35mm - HD uncompressed transfer to hard drive & a little HVX 200 .... i thought it looked excellent before the transfer to HDcam... i saw it at the festival (HDcam) - it looked OK ( approx 8ft wide screen) ...
.......... IMO OK isn't good enough ...

[John Allardice]

Shawn, you talking about taking your Red Shorts to the Bend Film Festival, is putting images in my mind that I realllly don't want

[David Mullen ASC]

60i/1080 HDCAM has been a requirement for anything to be screened digitally at Sundance for a number of years now (regardless of whether the material was shot 24P or not, or in DV). They only want one tape format for the projectionists to deal with in the booths.

You probably could take a 24P/1080 submaster you've created, perhaps on a hard drive (?) over to a post house and ask them to convert it to 60i/1080 and put it on an HDCAM tape (if the festival requires 60i) or do the conversion to 60i yourself and just have them put it on tape. Or 24PsF/1080 if they don't need 60i.

Or rent an HDCAM deck.

Some festivals require an HD-D5 tape instead, because Panasonic is providing the decks for the festival (HDCAM being a Sony tape format.)

[M Most]

60i/1080 HDCAM has been a requirement for anything to be screened digitally at Sundance for a number of years now (regardless of whether the material was shot 24P or not, or in DV). They only want one tape format for the projectionists to deal with in the booths.


Personally, I'm hoping (and hearing some rumors) that the major festivals will have digital cinema servers available. This would allow delivery in the form of a digital cinema package, which is arguably a much better projection source than HD videotape, especially 60i videotape. It also makes it much more practical to do a "proper" DI finish on an indie picture, at least in terms of color correction, without immediately incurring the expense of doing film recording and printing - yet yielding a projection element that is essentially its equivalent.

[martinnoweck]

60i/1080 HDCAM has been a requirement for anything to be screened digitally at Sundance for a number of years now (regardless of whether the material was shot 24P or not, or in DV). They only want one tape format for the projectionists to deal with in the booths.

You probably could take a 24P/1080 submaster you've created, perhaps on a hard drive (?) over to a post house and ask them to convert it to 60i/1080 and put it on an HDCAM tape (if the festival requires 60i) or do the conversion to 60i yourself and just have them put it on tape. Or 24PsF/1080 if they don't need 60i.

Or rent an HDCAM deck.

Some festivals require an HD-D5 tape instead, because Panasonic is providing the decks for the festival (HDCAM being a Sony tape format.)


I used to work as technical director for some local festivals a couple of years ago and "being in booth" you love one tape per film and you hate different codecs or discussions like "the dvd used to run in my pc at home" ... not saying there aren't any problems with tape!

Martin

[martinnoweck]

Regarding your question I would rent a HDCAM SR deck for one day and do a playout of your FCP Sequenze to HDCAM SR (assuming you have a breakout box / videocard which can handle HD)

Another option would be: export your final as TIFF-Sequence, put the data on some kind of storage and go to a shop, import your Sequence of Stills and let them do a playout to HDCAM or HDCAM SR.

Martin

[Paul Hazlett]

Shawn, you talking about taking your Red Shorts to the Bend Film Festival, is putting images in my mind that I realllly don't want

I had to think about that for a minute. then I was sorry I did.

[laguun]

we are offering that all the time - inexpensive HDCAM out for festivals/masters/trailers etc.

its typically a little bit overbooked before the "usual" festivals, but heres the regular deal:

we accept the mayority of HD Quicktime & AVI codecs (bluefish, aja/koona, blackmagic decklink series etc) as well as cineon log / tif / tga etc. for trailers & short films, most customers FTP their content directly via a VPN, for full feature & longform doc they typically use harddisks.

we usually have 2-3 free nightshifts a week on one of the DI / NLE and those are then scheduled for the HDCAM-Masters. We offer this service at lower prices than the usual rental of HDCAM-recorders, as it is easier for our scheduling than to rent out to customers - and renting out also generates a lot of support requests, as not all editors are really completly familar with the different HDCAM-VCRs.

however, i suppose that the already mentioned 1800´HDCAM will offer lower price HDCAM rental (we have the expensive flagship HDCAMs, the HDW2000/p) in the near future.

regarding the quality of HDCAM - its very good for projection etc. for postproduction you might to record even higher standard (due to bitdepth and higher colorsampling), but for broadcast, projection etc you´ll hardly be able to tell the difference of a 0-generation hdcam from 0-generation hdcam sr without using specialised testpatterns to expose the weaknesses.

[laguun]

i sure hope HDcam isn't the next accepted ( masses) format ....

HDCAM already is the standard for 1080p delivery, at least here in europe.
some accept HDCAM SR as well, very few D5HD.




original - 35mm - HD uncompressed transfer to hard drive & a little HVX 200 .... i thought it looked excellent before the transfer to HDcam... i saw it at the festival (HDcam) - it looked OK ( approx 8ft wide screen) ...
.......... IMO OK isn't good enough ...
that certainly wasn´t the format itself, rather the projector or mnot perfectly done out/transcoding.

hdcam 0st generation should look excellent on a decent 2k projection.

hdcam can be problematuc if you do many generations and it hasn´t a high bitspace which makes colorgrading harder than it would need to be and it has a 3:1:1 colorsubsampling which can make different postproduction processes more difficult to set up. but with the blank eye on a projection you can hardly tell hdcam from sr or d5hd without getting very close to the screen - or using specialised testpatterns.

common mistakes who can make hdcam (and hdcam sr as well) looking "only ok" instead of "very good" in digital projection include
- linear upscaling to 2k, especially with sharpening on in the scaler.
- running 60i/50i on the projector instead of P - many HDCAM decks support i from p output and then you get up to a 50% reduced projection resolution
- 709 via 601

saw all 3 of them often. make sure to talk with the projection before the projection to clarify if its p, psf, i, what colorspace hes in, and if its a 2k (as the typical christie roadshow etc) recommend pixel by pixel instead of scaling, or, if you or him do know how to mess with the scalers settings, then dare to scale.

[Lucas Wilson]

What would be the most cost-effective way to get someone to make me an HDCAM master from a finished FCP export?...

Shawn,

Check out... http://www.digitalservicestation.com/

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA.

[laguun]

Shawn,

Check out... http://www.digitalservicestation.com/

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA.

for US citizens a good option, however, it seems that our prices are....

~60% lower.

to give the idea: 1h30 master import (3-9 hours) + 2 hours vcr runtime ~200$

[Jim Arthurs]

If your NLE system is equipped with an AJA or Blackmagic card with HD-SDI out you could always cart the whole kit over to a post house with a deck and do a more or less real time dump to tape with just some set up time ahead of the process... no rendering or file copying... gosh knows I've had to do this enough with my full systems for SD to Beta/DigiBeta in years past...

[martinnoweck]

Hi Laguun,

do you have a website?

Martin

[Don King]

to give the idea: 1h30 master import (3-9 hours)And that example how much is it?

Don

[Ralph Oshiro]

If you were in L.A., we would just drop an HDW1800 HDCAM VTR at your house or office where your NLE is, and you output from your own bay. Don't know what our rate will be yet (partner is out of town), but it'll be waaaay cheaper than a post house.