35mm to HDV

corug7 wrote on 10/13/2006, 11:54 AM

We are looking to sell services to one of our larger clients involving bumping 35mm film to HDV. Unfortunately, as many of you know and are probably grappling with, the HVR-25u has limited recording abilities thanks to exclusion of proper component inputs (nevermind that some $200.00 DVD recorders have these). So, I guess I'm looking for an SDI to HDV/firewire conversion box. I know they aren't cheap, but can anyone point me in the right direction as to what works and what doesn't.

While we're at it, how about your recommendation for RS-422 to LANC adapters since it would have been too difficult to make this deck resemble anything professional.

Sorry about the tone. I just like it when things actually work out of the box and I don't have to cobble them together. We have a state of the art encoding system that WON'T DO FIREWIRE PROTOCOL!!!

Comments

farss wrote on 10/13/2006, 4:09 PM

Convergent Design should at some point in the future have a HD SDI to HDV converter. Their current offering only goes the other way around.
Reading your post though I'm kind of confused, are you trying to go from SD SDI and/or SD Component to HDV?
If so I have to wonder why.
If you've got HD SDI I'b be looking for a HD SDI BMD / AJA card to ingest at 4:2:2.
If you've only got SD SDI from the telecine a standard Declink card would seem the way to go. But going from SD 4:2:2 to HDV, who would want such a thing.
The best solution surely would be to scan the 35mm to an image sequence and bring that into Vegas to render to HDV.

corug7 wrote on 10/13/2006, 4:54 PM

Sorry Bob. After re-reading my question I see why you got confused, but it was more of an either/or statement.

We're looking to go with an HD telecine out of house, but they are only able to output HD SDI and SD formats, and they don't have a conversion box for HDV.

I guess that begs the question, can the Sony decks actually encode HDV, or are they only capable of writing a previously encoded HDV stream from another source?

ForumAdmin wrote on 10/13/2006, 5:06 PM

You might look at transferring to XDCAM HD. These decks can be rented in most major markets, minimal setup is required, there's HD-SDI in for the telecine feed, 35MB "HQ" mode is quite good (better than 25MB HDV)...and this will give you a completely file-based workflow that wires right into Vegas 7.

farss wrote on 10/13/2006, 6:11 PM

The component connections on the HDV decks are output only.
As I said Convergent may have a solution sometime.
The suggestion to go with XDCAM is quite a good one if this is only for dailies, the roughly 40min recording time limit could be a big issue for full length movies.
The upside is the XDCAM disks are relatively cheap, they're robust as well and easy to ship. Once recorded everything is file based so you don't need monster disk arrays like you'd need with HDCAM.
Conversly I'd imagine the facility can record to HDCAM, if so you'd only need a deck from the JH3 line, still WAY more expensive than anything HDV.
The downside is you'd need a deck for the transfer house and one for yourself and that's not petty cash.