XLH1, KONA 3 and/or KONA LHe
 

I am in the market of purchasing an XLH1 along with a KONA 3 or KONA LHe. i understand that it is better to convert to the DVCPRO HD standard and edit it that way. My question is can i convert from 720P to 1080 on the LHe or just the KONA3? Regarding monitoring the video on an NTSC monitor we have a SONY PVM14L5, but how would i monitor the HD footage? Do i need an HD SDI card for the monitor, and furthermore do they still sell it? With the XLH1 if i shoot to tape, then in post can i bring in the footage via the HD SDI? We also have the AJA i/O box as well.

Gregory,

Both will convert 720p to 1080p but I would stay with the 720p personally. Having said that, my boss chose to go with the XL H1. We shoot in either of two ways depending on the budget and client needs: HDV to tape and uncompressed 10 bit HD captured live to a MacPro with a Kona LHe and 2.5T Ciprico fibre channel RAID.

In the edit suite we monitor both formats with a consumer HDTV and an SD CRT production monitor. The HDTV is a Sharp Aquos 26" which I'm not too impressed with but it does the job and we're not going to buy a new one until we get a larger viewing area. We use a Black Magic HDLink box to convert the output from the Kona HD SDI to an HDTV signal and HDMI connection.

For the SD monitor the Kona will downconvert to SD on the fly but it took me a while to figure out the connection from the Kona to the monitor. Here's the trick, of the RGB component ouptuts on the Kona, the GREEN acts as a composite out when used alone.

We also use the AJA Io on a different G5 system for our Beta and DV stuff.

We are very pleased with our setup and so are our clients.

We purchased our gear from Brian Longley at Zotz Digital and he and Jason have been very helpful. I highly recommend them if you need to make more purchases and need great support.

Dave,
thank you so very much! I think i am a little unclear as i would like to know if i shoot to tape when i get back to the edit suite can i bring in the footage from the tape via the HD-SDI out to the KONA LHe?

Gregory,

Yes you casn do that and the nice thing is you can then use any codec you like. The down side is there is no timecode or audio embedded in the XL H1 SDI so you would need to take an analog audio output and use the FCP time code.

Gregory,

You'll save yourself a lot of hassle if you simply edit HDV native, and then copy a finished HDV edit and paste it into an HD timeline with a less destructive codec. I use the Sheer codec, which is basically the same as uncompressed, but less than half the bit rate. It still creates huge files (about 38 MBs for HDV 24F) but perfectly preserves the original material.

The idea is to avoid the "conform to HDV" process, which rebuilds GOPs and technically applies another pass of MPEG2 compression. It doesn't necessarily look bad at all to render and output to HDV tape, but if you want to preserve your material all the way through post, it's best to use a lossless codec like Sheer or uncompressed. You can always recompress to other QT HD codecs like DVCPRO HD, AIC, PhotoJPEG etc. from a lossless QT file.

Or spring for the Miranda box made for the H1 that embeds audio and timecode into the SDI stream. It's about $2,000.

John and everyone else,
thank you as i will now look at the MIRANDA box. I'm sure by the time NAB rolls around it will be like why did i buy this? How reliable is the MIRANDA box and please remember that i want to shoot on the XL H1, capture to DVCProHD Codec (using the KONA LHe), edit in DVCProHD, then output to BETA SP for broadcast. Am i missing something and will this look exceptionally better than our current XL2? These are for broadcast cable and local network commercials.

You should be fine with that approach, Gregory. I was trying to tell you that you didn't necessarily need to edit in an intermediate to get good results.

Thank you for all of the help and i am greatly appreciative.