HD: Mother May I

MichaelS wrote on 10/18/2004, 8:48 PM

I had one of my corporate customers pose a simple question today. Is it feasible (both financially and operationally) to create a High Definition video for the company's Welcome Center?

Assume production skills and the "human resources" are available. What equipment would be necessary to accomplish the task? I'm looking for ideas with reasonable trade-off between quality and price.

Can you suggest...
1. Camera
2. NLE
3. Storage
4. Delivery Media
5. Presentation System

I'd appreciate your comments.

Thanks

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 10/18/2004, 9:34 PM

1. Camera: Sony CineAlta
2. NLE: Vegas & Xpri
3. Storage: Comes with Xpri, but you can also use a Medea 360 dual channel RAID
4. Delivery Media: HDCam Deck
5. Presentation System: HD capable plasma or projection system on a great screen

In a few months, you might consider HDV. Sony will have their professional cam out for sub 10K, and you can edit that in Vegas using all of your existing gear except for your external monitor. (unless you've got an HD monitor/card)

MichaelS wrote on 10/18/2004, 9:57 PM

Thanks.

busterkeaton wrote on 10/18/2004, 10:36 PM

When you are done with researching this, could you come back to board and post your price for all this?

farss wrote on 10/19/2004, 1:28 AM

So long as you don't need to use actual HD footage you can do this now in Vegas. Many digital still cameras will take images better then even HiDef video and you can apply FXs etc in a HiDef Vegas project and ouput to WM9 for playback in a PC connected to a plasma or projection system.
If you do need actual footage don't overlook shooting in Super 16 and having it transferred to an AVI file or as a still sequence. Again this can be edited in Vegas and output to WM9.
Once you enter the world of HDCAM or CineAlta then costs escalate dramatically.
Bob.

musman wrote on 10/19/2004, 1:39 PM

"If you do need actual footage don't overlook shooting in Super 16 and having it transferred to an AVI file or as a still sequence. Again this can be edited in Vegas and output to WM9."

I just shot my last project in super 16 and had it transfered to minidvCam. I thought the only other option was digibeta (unless I paid for the super expensive suite and got HD tapes). Is there a way to go straight to an AVI or still sequence and get better quality? Thanks!

farss wrote on 10/19/2004, 3:31 PM

I'm no expert and have never done this, so this is just my engineering brain kicking in, OK!
If you simply had a one light transfer done you've lost most of the advantage of shooting on film. If you did a supervised transfer and had it graded on a film quality system before transferring to DV25 then you've picked up a few advantages. Grading a DI gives you I think 10 bit depth so things can be pushed much more. Understand that film captures far more detail in terms of depth than DV can handle, remapping that into the DV color space before transfer could make for a big difference.
If you wanted to work at higher definition you could have the lab supply a targa sequence on a hard drive and bring that into Vegas. Again having the CC done before resampling would help a bit.

Bob.