Sorry that it has been a while since I posted. I have been working many many hours on my current DVCPRO HD series for National Geographic (this series edited on Avid). Constant script changes keep us editors busy. That and last week I worked another job at the same time for a commercial post facility. Getting my foot in another door, and working with a friend that I met at the Apple FCP discussions. That and I am STILL doing testing and research and playing with footage to see what I can make it look like. Finally, today, I have a night off.

I had a good friend check out my system last week. Besides being a friend, he is a professional colorist and HD expert, working for a well known Final Cut Pro dealership setting up High Definition Final Cut Pro suites. He wanted to see what I built as my offline system.

He seemed impressed. He really liked my monitors, the Dell 2405 (which barefeats has beating the Apple 23″ pretty soundly – http://www.barefeats.com/lcd). So far I have been using Digital Cinema Desktop to view my DVCPRO HD footage, and must say that it looked darn good. I showed it to my friend, and he seemed pretty impressed too. He asked to look at the HD bars, and again, was impressed. The blacks were black, the whites white, and the colors VERY well represented. He said that he’d be confident in the color representation, and would perform color correction with the current setup.

Color correction for LOOK, not deliverable…just to be clear. For final tweaking and checking for broadcast safe colors, he still only go for the high end CRT monitors and external scopes. But hey, I’d only trust those too. But is is nice to know that the color representation is so good, that it is fine for preliminary color correction. No HD card and HD link that converts the HD SDI signal to DVI…just straight DVI via Digital Cinema Desktop.

Oh, and the “?” in the subject line refers to the fact that DVCPRO HD is an offline, and often an online quality codec.