I feel your pain too. Glad to see you got it solved though. One suggestion I have for anyone working with HDV and the KONA LHe is to invest in a Convergent Designs HD Connect SI. This little gadget has saved my sanity on more than one occasion. After configuring with your Mac, it uses Firewire to control your deck and decodes HDV into pristine HD SDI. It has been rock solid for me and I plan on posting a QuickTip about my use of it over at HDFilmtools.com in the near future.

Best,
Larry “Lawrence” Jordan
HDFilmtools.com

But… when you add up all the extra editor hours, all the burnt time, and the exponentially increased chances of a mistake, is it *really* still too expensive to add storage?

We’d love to stay ProREs, but now might capture as HDV and render out as ProRes.

The cleanest way to handle this material is to transcode to ProRes upon ingest. Plain and simple.

This company used Avid for the first season of this series, and they had issues with this deck. They switched to FCP for a variety of reasons, including the ability to work at full resolution, ProRes specifically.

Now we might try to capture as HDV and then use that all the way through COLOR. I will test that….but I haven’t heard good things.

A reader in Tahiti – Mauru’uru

Thanks so much for making my day a little brighter [smile].

~Luke

Sorry this is so frustrating. If it makes you feel any better, yesterday morning a client sent over footage for a session, and we discovered their “footage” is a half-dozen WMV files at 320×240 and (the very best part) 26 frames per second.

Obviously we called to ask for the original tapes. “They’re in Michigan,” the client said. “No problem, just call us back when they’re in DC.”

I miss digibeta.

But even though FCP’s media manager is still a problem, I know a big part of the issue lies with HDV and that deck. People on Avid have issues with that deck as well. But this situation was completely bizarre. I have never encountered an issue like this before. I have offlined and onlined before with FCP and never had this issue. Offline RT from DV, offline RT from digibeta masters and XDCAM. Heck, Bunim/Murray Productions is ALL ABOUT the offline/online workflow and they haven’t had any major issues.

This just seems like a perfect storm of a problem. FCPs weak media manager coupled with HDV issues (recapturing HDV, even at full resolution, can end up with footage slighly off…time code slippage), and that deck having problems. But this is early in the game and I still have some weapons to use when I jump back into the fray. I have more shows to ‘online’ down the road. So I’ll have to try a few tests.

And post results, of course.

Jeff, that deck does have firewire, but we need to capture this footage as ProRes, that is how we are finishing the show, and I cannot capture media managed footage as ProRes. I can’t RECAPTURE (batch capture) footage as ProRes via firewire…only the initial capture using that trick method mentioned on the Cow and Ken Stone. And yes, we tried FW deck control with similar bad results. I guess I can try it again with a batch capture, but SDI out is needed.

Someone mentioned trying a lesser deck via Component and FW deck contrl. I am just desperate enough to try that too.

And Andrew, I am in Santa Monica, so is that West enough?

I feel for you Shane, having to clean up someone else’s mess. But look on the bright side, at least you have HD source footage to go back to. A few weeks ago I got the tapes back from a 2 camera shoot and the ‘B’ Cam was HD but the ‘A’ Cam was mistakenly set to SD. Yeah, that sucked. I used Compressor to up-rez the SD stuff and that looked loads better than having FCP scale it up but it still didn’t look great (obviously).