Convergent Design HD-Connect SI
 

Any one have any experience with the convergent-design software? Looks promising and they're a sponsor...

john
evilgeniusentertainment.com

Renamed from "anyone use it yet?" and moved from HD100 to General HD Acquisition.

Cooltastic Chris. Just to specify though, anyone use it in conjunction with the JVC 100?

john
evilgeniusentertainment.com

John,

I've been testing the HD Connect LE and have been impressed with its build quality and the amount of uses I've found for it.

The benefits are that you can actually see what you are going to get after mpeg2 compression live on a HD monitor. There is of course a slight latency due to encoding and firewire, but it works quite well for confidence monitoring or backup recording to HDCAM or DVCPROHD via HD-SDI. It can easily downconvert to letterbox or squeeze as well.

It also adds RS-422 control to any firewire device, which is very cool for those without a proper HDV deck, but want to capture via component or SDI capture card.

The separate TC out works well for making TC slave dubs to other formats like BetaSp or DBeta.
You could potentially use this function to jam sync with TC DAT machine, but a offset would need to be used to compensate for the firewire latency.

However, it doesn't seem to read 24P TC perfectly from the HD100, but neither does FCP yet. This leads me to believe that the problem is with firmware in the camera...something that has been hinted at recently as an issue.
I'm still looking into this.

It requires 5V DC @ 2Amps, which is supplied by a small external power supply at the moment. I'm going to chat with my camera engineer friend and see if he can build me a AB 12V to 5V adapter. He doesn't think it should be too much of a problem.

Overall, great product.

I am missing something on the purpose of the convergent box. Will it capture a SDI stream and downconvert it so a laptop could more easily ingest the footage?

No, I believe it's to allow you to use HDV cams and decks in an edit suite that has no native support for HDV. Even now, AVID has no really good way to edit HDV natively, no matter what they advertise. The problem is that there is no online/offline workflow built in. A lot of companies have taken to offlining DV and then up-rezzing via something like this box to a codec that AVID can understand. Usually it's done via the component analog outs, but this box should allow the same quality with less hardware on the NLE side.

What you're talking about would be GREAT, but sadly nobody offers it yet. Eventually I'm sure we'll have SDI > DVCpro-HD via firewire ingest.

oops, accidentally posted twice. sorry

we used the convergent box on "the signal" earlier this year. It seemed to handle any sony HDV great but that didn't help us as we were using a canon. It ended up working more or less with the canon but there was a lot of finessing to get it to really work the way we wanted. (lots of audio slipping and frame sliding)

HDV is so cool, right? I'm sure eventually the niggles will be worked out, but it's too bad the format came out before it was ready for prime time. A company I often work for really wanted to drop a lot of cash and swap out their DVX's for XL-H1's or Hd-100's.... but even WITH Avid's on-site support they couldn't make a usable workflow. They ended up renting a couple of Varicams for each show, for a LOT more than they could have bought a fleet of Hd-100's. Could have saved roughly $50,000 per show (incl. rentals and post)

You want it to work so badly...but it just doesn't.

Thanks Tim. Do you know if they are working directly with camera manufacturers? Is this more aimed at producers of live shows or shows that need a quick turnaround vs narrative films? Thanks for all you help, as always -

john
evilgeniusentertainment.com