Thanks for the link.

Two points on this compression issue: 1) if you are putting the SDI to a hard disk, why stick to the data rates imposed by a tape transport? Why not let the rate rise as required to maintain a picture quality level? There would be a certain rate at which MPEG2 would be fine, even for blue screen work and this would be way, way below the raw SDI stream data rate. HDV style compression at 100mBS would look perfect in almost all circumstances...and that would steream to a SATA2 drive...no problem.

2) for blue screen why no go one step further and extract and compress the KEY on the fly and store it as an alpha channel, say a 250 level grey scale using LZW compression, then one could compress the actual image data further without damaging the key as a seperate data stream.

Either way we should start thinking outside the box: Canon have kindly presented us with a great, pre-conformed SDI stream...lets make good use of it!! We just have to take that data and make different decisions to those forced on us by the HDV standard...one that suites OUR needs.

The electronics for decoding SDI is off-the-shelf, just look at cards available for computer systems..they are cheap.

I know the cool kids aren't supposed to stoop to using things like this but dammit I haven't had to do without a flip-out screen for 10 or 15 years, I love the range of camera placement you can get from it that you can't get when the eyepiece is chained to your head. Plus I have a glidecam and... ugh... how do you Xl1 veterans do it?

Betsy, I've talked to several companies that import those little LCD monitors that you can put on top of a camera. I asked for a Canon XL version of something like a 4" screen, native 16:9, on a rotating slide rail that would slip onto the EVF mounting channel on the camera body. So far no dice. I bet it would sell like crazy.

I found a company that sells a mount for the EVF rail... I'll look for it and see if I can't find it again...

Yes please, do tell! I'd love to find out who that is!

It actually took a little looking in some other DVInfo forums for me to find out who it was... It's a company that specializes in LCD monitors, specifically 2.35/2.4:1 and 16:9 LCDs... Anyways, if you look here, you'll notice that the monitor is mounted on the XL1 where the EVF goes... I emailed them at one time and I think it was around $100-$150 for this mount by it's lonesome... of course then you need and LCD that fits the multipin connector on the XL series cams... maybe with a diagram of the pins and someone whos good with soldering you could get something that would work... Or maybe this company sells something, I dunno...

Thanks as always Chris and Kevin, nothing's simple in this life, is it? My main worry is that 24F thing. In the past none of those frame modes has been as good as the cameramaker's claimed; let's hope this is the first exception.

How about a Playstation Portable as an external monitor, it's a great screen, can it accept video in?

Why does the Canon XL H1 not uncompressed 1080i 4:4:4 over HD-SDI?

That is a dynamite question. Why doesn't it? Circuitry limitation?

4:4:4 requires dual link HDSDI. Single HDSDI feed doesn't have enough bandwidth to support 4:4:4.

David, When you said dual link SDI it hit me like a ton of bricks. That's what Liquid Chrome Editors have been asking for. I didn't make the connection because I've only worked in 422. Thanks for the reminder..

Broken link
 

the "Introduction" link on
http://www.dvinfo.net/canonxlh1/watchdog.php
is broken.

Is the HD-SDI output 8bit, 10 bit or 12 bit 4:2:2 ?