Varicam and Vegas?

farss wrote on 1/25/2005, 4:12 AM
I'm not expecting to just plug one of these beasts in Vegas and let her rip.
Have to work thru a job with client next week that involves shooting high speed machinery, now they're prepared to show how the machines work using CGI but I'm thinking we could maybe get a high enough frame rate out of the Varicam to get it SloMoed enough to show it effectively.
Now obviously there must be a way to get footage from the Varicam into Vegas, I'm only talking a few minutes at the most so I'm not looking for an elegant workflow, even bringing it in as a stills sequence would do. What system is a post house likely to have that'd be able to ingest the Varicam footage and give it to me in a suitable format for Vegas. Thinking about it maybe a stills sequence would be best, I want all the frames, that way I can fiddle with it as needed and also cut it into HDV footage.

Other possibility is to get them to xfer it to fwire HD box as an AVI, in which case is there a codec available that's Varicam / Vegas compatible. Other possibility would be to have them render out as uncompressed AVI but will they have a system that can handle that.

Sorry for all the tricky questions but if I have some vague inkling of what can handle the task it narrows down the search a bit and makes it much easier when it comes to talking to the post house for price.

Bob.

Comments

farss wrote on 1/25/2005, 3:14 PM
Barry?
Anyone?
Coursedesign wrote on 1/25/2005, 4:14 PM
The free Matrox DV50 codec might be suitable for this, otherwise huffyuv 4:2:2.
risce1 wrote on 1/25/2005, 4:35 PM
Why not just use a high speed cam ? Oh,,,,,want an excuse to mess with a Varicam.
farss wrote on 1/25/2005, 5:06 PM
All I really need IS a high speed cam, but as far as I know the only readily available video camera that goes above 60i is the Varicam. There is a film camera, thinks it's made by Mitchell but I looked into one of those years ago and it was around $1K/day + stock + processing + telecine and at 100fps or more you go thru stock at a very fast rate.

Bob.
musman wrote on 1/25/2005, 5:50 PM
This might be a stupid response, but do you know anyone with a Mac? I thought they could ingest it straight from the firewire and then I'd think you could render it as a series of stills like they do to use photoshop. I think I'm missing something.
farss wrote on 1/25/2005, 6:23 PM
Not a stupid answer at all however they'd need an SDI card I think.
Maybe he knows someone with a card or I guess I could fit a card into my PC, all I need is a crash capture. But the data rate is 100MB/sec to get all the frames from what I know.
I do know someone with FCP HD but no SDI card.
But I think there's a way you can capture from the Varicam into FCP via 1394.

Bob.
musman wrote on 1/25/2005, 6:39 PM
My understanding was you didn't need SDI, just firewire. Thought I read about how they had added support for the camera and capturing its various frame rates just using firewire. I think it needed to be fw 800 though and I believe I heard that some of the earlier G5s had a defect with their fw800 ports so people weren't able to use them for this task.
I believe it was this article/announcement that said all this that led me to look into fw800 for pc and Vegas.
If you have access to a Varicam and a G5, you might just give it a try.
Barry_Green wrote on 1/25/2005, 8:31 PM
Yes, Vegas doesn't support DVCPRO-HD yet, so you'd have to have someone with FCP-HD or Avid Express HD to help you out.

Panasonic makes a firewire-capable DVCPRO-HD deck, and FCP-HD can import VariCam data straight off the tape just like DV. So you could rent the deck for a day, dump your footage into the Mac, and have the FCP editor render out a sequence of stills that you could then use in Vegas. You don't need HD-SDI or anything like that, but you would need the firewire-capable DVCPRO-HD deck and a Mac running FCP-HD, or a mac or PC running Avid Express HD.

I'm really hoping Vegas adds full firewire support for DVCPRO-HD, HDV, and background rendering in the next version! :)
Coursedesign wrote on 1/25/2005, 8:45 PM
The data rate is 100 Mb/s, not 100MB/s.

That's not so hard at all, only 1/3rd of uncompressed SD :O)

Panny didn't know of a common DVCPROHD codec between FCP HD and Vegas. Still think huffyuv 4:2:2 could do it though.
farss wrote on 1/25/2005, 8:56 PM
Thanks Barry, doesn't sound too hard at all.
Bob.