Comments

GlennChan wrote on 6/26/2006, 11:15 AM
A company called Magma makes expansion devices for laptops such that you can get PCI slots for a laptop. It goes from the ?PCMCIA? slot to an expansion bay.

Chances are, it probably does not work with the Decklink cards. But maybe it will...?

http://www.mobl.com/expansion/

I can't remember which particular flavour of PCI the Decklink cards wanted (i.e. was it PCI-X?).

2- There are convertors/bridges out there that will take SDI or component in and convert that to firewire/DV.

3- I'm going to blaspheme here and point out that Final Cut Pro with the Aja IO should be able to do uncompressed capture onto a laptop (onto a FW800 drive).

4- Some of the newer betaSP decks and maybe the digibeta decks can have firewire out.
reidc wrote on 6/26/2006, 11:23 AM
Not a blaspheme. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do to get the job done! The laptop in question is a MacBook Pro, which it occurs to me may NOT have a PC slot. I searched the Vegas forum on this topic and indeed found a thread re your Magma suggestion. I have a Canopus ADVC100. Maybe have to step up from that for this job. I have a dual Xeon tower available for the job, but I'd love to get portable & mobile if I could, hence the laptop interface requirement.
farss wrote on 6/26/2006, 2:26 PM
Do you want to import it at around native qulaity or just as DV.
If the former forget it on a laptop of any flavor there just isn't the bus speed to cope. If the latter then Sony's J30 has firewire, Vegas will see the deck just like a DV deck. The only gottcha is with BetaSP, the J30 lacks the correction circuitry of real SP decks, i.e. no dynamic tracking, no dropout compensation. If GOOD SP ingest via firewire is your goal then a UVW 1600/1800 and the SD Connect from convergent Design is as good as it gets.

Also be aware that Vegas is ONLY 8 bit, if you're staying in DV not an issue but going back to SP I'd be a tad worried about losses.

Bob.
reidc wrote on 6/26/2006, 2:42 PM
Just found out that DigBeta will be my source, so SP is not an issue in the immediate term. Would be nice though. Am I SOL re ingest on the laptop? Sounds like the J30 ingested into my dual Xeon tower is the only option.

Reid C
farss wrote on 6/26/2006, 2:52 PM
Well as I said with the Sony J30, DB via 1394 isn't a problem except it'll end up as just DV. From my experience in PAL land the difference isn't that staggering, going out to DVD I've yet to be able to justify the cost of ingesting at 4:2:2 versus 4:2:0 even though I have the PC and decks to do the job.
In NTSC the difference would be more noticeable given the 4:2:2->4:1:1->4:2:0 conversions involved.

All that aside even if you could ingest 4:2:2 to the laptop, keep in mind that although the Sony YUV codec is less CPU intensive than DV you need fast disk i/o to keep up with the amount of data involved.

Bob.

PS, you can always use DV proxies!
Ingest on big box, edit on laptop, do final render on big box.