Hi Everyone. I'm joining the club

[Phil Hanna]

I wanted to take a moment and say hello. I guess I am officially joining the club as my new EX1 will arrive Tuesday. I have certainly enjoyed all the information and videos you all have posted. It made my decision an easy one.

Thanks!

Phil Hanna

[Raymond Schlogel]

Congrats Phil, I'm sure your dying with excitement as I was. While it does have it's quirks, as I'm sure you've seen on this forum, every camera I've had has had their own. Despite them this is by far the most amazing and fun (yea, I said fun!) camera I've ever owned. Hope you think so too.

- Ray

[Steven D. Martin]

Welcome-

I tend to get a little freaked out when I read of all the trouble some people seem to have with the EX1, but I will tell you that it's an AMAZING piece of hardware! Yes, it IS fun, and produces brilliant images. I'm moving over from my JVC HD100, which produces wonderful images, but I gotta tell ya that the workflow's a bit convoluted. Not so with the EX1. I shoot at least four times as much with the EX1 because it's do danged easy to carry, shoot with, and not to mention the instant gratification from the SxS cards.

[Steven Thomas]

I agree Steven.
I've also used the JVC HD100 for a couple years. The HD100 was a decent camera and really makes some decent footage. I'm still editing footage from this camera.

The EX1 really steps it up with rez, latitude, lower noise, better codec. It's awesome.

I've been burning Blu-ray and the EX1 footage is jaw dropping.

[Phil Hanna]

I am very excited about a new way of making movies. Steven, how do you do the Blu-Ray burn. What kind of costs are associated with that technology at this point? I have a G5 Mac with 8GB ram and a ton of storage space. I edit on FCP 6.2 so my first test will be to shot something and get it out of the camera and into the Mac. Then I need to figure out how to convert it into a usable item like a DVD. As I understand it, you can only do SD output now, but there has to be a way to convert that outstanding footage into something usable for the world and Blu-Ray was the first thing that came to mind.

Phil

[Steven Thomas]

I'm not sure about Blu-ray for Mac solutions.

I bought the LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray/DVD/CD read/writer. It also reads HD-DVD.
It cost $330.
It works great!

The Blu-ray discs (single layer) BR-R are expensive between $10-$20 each!
The rewritable disc (BD-RE) is a must for testing ($20-25). The LG comes with a rewritable.

It's expensive for the media. The LG is awesome. It works great.


I do all my testing on the rewritable.
I'm happy that Sony pulled though with Blu-ray over HD-DVD.
Now, if we can get the media to come down.

It will......
I remember these days all to well when buying my first CD-R writer.
The media was expensive.

[David Lorente]

As Steven said, I remember when we bought our first CD writer... It was ten years ago, it costed about 80.000 spanish pesetas (the euro still wasn't used, this was about 500€), only 2x write speed, though our old Pentium sometimes failed to deliver such a high data rate! CD-Rs costed 2.000 pesetas (about 12€).

And only seven years ago, when the first DVD burners where available, they costed more than 10.000€! Fortunately for us, the technologies advance quite quickly, and prizes are always down and down...

By the way, when do the SxS cards will cost the same as current CompactFlash cards? Not too long, I hope!

[Phil Bloom]

Congrats Phil, any questions feel free to ask!

[Matt Davis]

Originally Posted by Phil Bloom

any questions feel free to ask!

Hello Mr Bloom,

do you do interlace?

I have found that FCP does a very nice line in down-conversion if you want progressive. Yet a significant proportion of my clients still need interlaced Standard Definition DVCAM rushes simply to fit with other footage. I gather you felt this pain so much it required the move to a DSR-450...

I'm very happy with a workflow that gets progressive SD from the EX1 HD. I am a little burdened with getting 720p50 EX1 to DVCAM interlaced as this requires going through After Effects. It works beautifully, but it feels like picking the kids up from school in a JCB.

Do you know of a better, maybe more FCP-centric way of getting 720p50 to SD 50i? I'm dreaming of a little Compressor Droplet that takes each frame of 720p50, scales down to SD and does the following sequence:

Frame 01 --> Frame 1 Lower Field
Frame 02 --> Frame 1 Upper Field
Frame 03 --> Frame 2 Lower Field
Frame 04 --> Frame 2 Upper Field
Frame 05 --> Frame 3 Lower Field
et seq.

I don't think Compressor can re-interlace.

Maybe I'm wrong in using 720p50 as a SD (interlaced motion) substitute. But it does look very good.

Any thoughts?

[Phil Bloom]

so you want it to look like interlace not just be interlaced?

I have never tried to interlace progressive footage. Not sure how I would do this.

[Matt Davis]

Originally Posted by Phil Bloom

I have never tried to interlace progressive footage. Not sure how I would do this.

Okay, so I do sound like a deranged person when I mention this. I am getting used to it. Stand by:

What I want to do is to get the look of interlaced Standard Definition video from shooting 720P50 footage (so I'm shooting quasi-HD footage at twice the normal frame rate of SD). Why? Because I want to deliver:

- HD footage in progressive format that cuts together with hairy-chested cams
- SD footage that looks 'video' and cuts together with Z1 DVCAM

I CAN and do deliver this by pumping my finished edit through Adobe After Effects 6.0 - but my copy is old and will soon be put out to grass. It does a great job of down-sampling to SD and re-interlacing 50p to 50i.

What I want is a little Apple Compressor droplet or a recipe for this for Episode or Squeeze.

The EX1 does NOT do Standard Definition out of the box, but most of us who buy one MUST do Standard Definition. I can do Progressive, that's a given. On tape? Okay. I can do Interlaced with an overnight render. What - on tape? Sheesh. Doing clip by clip is painful. Doing a long clip is better, but it's still an edit.

After all, IIRC, you found this process so annoying that your answer was to purchase a DSR camera. I am not quite at that stage yet (your pain level does not bear thinking about, but I can imagine).

There MUST be a way to reinterlace 50p to PAL and 60p to NTSC! Yes After Effects, but is that it? Are we going to forever use pneumatic drills to brew tea?

[Paul Kellett]

Am i missing something ?
I just chuck 72050p on the vegas timeline and render it as interlaced,upper field first,main concept mpeg-2.
Then with DVD-A i burn the dvd.

Paul.

[Matt Davis]

Originally Posted by Paul Kellett

Am i missing something?

Probably not. Final Cut users originally had a great workflow with HDV. Now we Mac users are waiting to catch up with Vegas for re-interlacing from downconverted material. So it seems.