Absolutely.

Chris - I'm not a Mac guy but I thought there was another solution using the Decklink HD card and FCP5 to digitise directly to DVCPro50/HD?

Would that work as a cheaper solution than a Studio VTR?

John,
the Decklink HD is for Desktop machines, what would complicate outdoor shooting. But a PCMCIA version for a laptop would make it much easier for outdoor scenes.

HD-SDI recording with XL H1
 

First off, if anybody can do it, than it will be the BlackMagic Design folks who will come out with an HD/SD SDI card for notebooks. However, it will definitely NOT be a PCMCI card, as that technology won't be able to handle a tenth of the data throughput required. Think of a PCI-X (PCI Express) 16x card instead. And you have to have a good 2GB or dual channel DDR2 533 MHz systems RAM and 256 MB of video RAM.

Two such notebooks off the top of my head (we happen to own both) come to mind: HP's zd800 and ALIENWARE's Area-51. With the HP, you can get an HP dv8000z with dual hard drives;and the ALIENWARE you can get with twin HDs arranged in a RAID 0 config.

Admittedly, I don't know much about the Macs (and prefer to leave it that way...) :~))

So... we do have topliner power-user notebooks out there that could technically handle HD data input stream.... while we are still working on the interface (HD/SD SDI capture card for mobile PCI-X 16x).

Right now, you can build a nifty little SFF (small form factor) PC that is highly portable and can use the desktop version of one of the DeckLink HD cards. Remember, even the smallest and most portable desktop will be able to do more than the mightiest of laptops...

Matching of Camera to Desired Finished Output
 

So true. I am a tad unsure as to why Frederico wants to marry the Canon X2 H1 to a Panasonic DVCPro HD VTR. Chris, you are right: these manufacturers are territorial like a 1,000 pound male King Kong of the washed-out recent remake vintage. The venom that is being created and tossed about between and amongst JVC and Panasonic and Sony is mind-boggling.

Canon has a different position... their X2 H1 is their top gun, he Canon kitty's miaw. Now, with Sony, for example, their HVR-Z1 is a bottom dweller... Sony has at least two, maybe three tiers of cameras and standards top of their three-chip HDV offering. Hey, you want TRUE HD SDI out, fine, get one of their CineAlta camcorders and you shall have it. May even get some change back from your USD $100,000 note (if you bring your own lens, that is).

My company produced a feature film that was shot on film, with the footage telecined to Sony Digital Betacam (4:3 A/R SD) and Sony HDCAM (16:0 A/R HD). This is rather pricey, of course... but film is film. Whereas you can certainly shoot a feature onto DV and then blow it up from DV video to 35mm neg, it is kind of a Frankensteinian approach, in my opinion.

But back to the Canon X2 H1 hook-up. Yes, it has HD/SD SDI OUT. But is the signal coming out 8-bit or 10-bit? Does anyone know for sure at this point?

If it is 10-bit, then yes, you can hook the H1 to a portable DVCPro VTR or to the portable Sony DVCAM VTR, and you've got it. That still leaves the issue of how you going to transfer to tape the digital audio and the time code... as I understand the X2 H1 will only give you picture via the SDI OUT connection... not audio or TC.

Life was definitiely easier back in the Super 8 era, hmmm? ;-))

Editing is not my main skill but I do enough of it to know that editing DVCPRO-HD requires some fast drives. To keep your workflow similar to DV you need a fibre raid, I believe it will do 5-7 streams of DVCPRO-HD. You can get a small firewire raid with 10,000RPM drives but those arent cheap either and still relatively small.

I am sure there are cheaper ways to do it but you will be really bogged down.



ash =o)

I've got a PowerBook 17 and 2 Terabytes of LaCie Extreme FireWire 800 drives. Not fast enough for DVCproHD?
If not, can I implement this Fibre raid you are talking about with the equip I've already got?

You can rig anything to work... it will just be slower than DV, in some cases, PAINFULLY slow =o) The real trick is outputting your full rez edit which, in most workflows, will have to be done in real time.


ash =o)

DVCProHD is 100Mb/s. The sustained rate of what you describe should easily handle a couple of streams of IF hooked up via FW 800 bus. But I would advise testing first. The problem for capturing though is transcoding on the fly to that codec requires a great deal of computing power - you really need a hardware encoder.

Exactly - these would be way cheaper than any notebook. Obviously it's not a fully portable situation, but then neither is a laptop/notebook . I mentioned the Decklink card in preference to a studio VTR, not a laptop.

Capturing wouldn't be a problem if using P2.

Why not? Is there a separate P2 recorder to the HVX200, that will accept HD-SDI and transcode on the fly from the XLH1? The only units I see on Panasonic's website are transfer units, one with a built in hard disk, one PC feeder unit with a USB2 connection to the laptop/PC (which seems a strange choice in itself, given that the rest of the acquisition path is IEEE).

I meant that if you insert a P2 card in the laptop and copy the file to your hardrive, you don't need to capture anymore, which is the hardest task. Then editing DVCproHD material with FCP, PBook G4 and FW800 LaCies seems much more fluid.

Still confused - how would you get the video on to the P2 card - this is an XLH1 thread isn't it? If you are just talking about capturing already acquired material in DVCProHD you don't need P2 cards to do that. Think we are talking at cross purposes here.

John, you're right, the post took a turn when Ash put the accent on editing. I followed and, since I'm interested in both cams (H1 and HVX), it became off thread. Sorry for this. I guess we can move it or just let it die here.