In Broadcast - October/November 2011 - 46

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InGEAR
Solid Progress In Tapeless Acquisition Cont.
Sound Devices PIX 240, Atomos Ninja, Convergent Design’s Nano Flash and AJA’s Ki Pro Mini deliver considerable advantages over camera manufacturers’ systems. Firstly, production teams have the opportunity to acquire in different formats, side stepping manufacturers’ codecs. Data can be recorded to accommodate a particular editing system, or with long-term archiving in mind. Indeed, these units can help achieve both: attach a Ki Pro Mini to a Panasonic HPX-371 and the camera operator can record natively in-camera in AVC-Intra 100 while the external recorder captures content in Final Cut Pro-ready Pro-Res. The secondary benefit of dual format acquisition is an automatically such as location or episode. Editors and media managers can then search for the clips they need. This kind of added functionality shaves hours off the edit. For future programming, the metadata process is even more vital: automated metadata will help avoid the painful process of reviewing every file looking for a pertinent clip at a later date. Yet further down the line the metadata can be used to assist the retrieval of archived material. X is already causing headaches for data managers. Similarly, to rely blindly on cameras to transfer data faultlessly to a hardware back-up device is a leap of faith. Many have fallen foul of odd errors or glitches because they omitted to test their particular set-up before going out on a shoot. Post and media transfer cannot be left to chance. It is vital to test a set-up in advance and plan how ingest and edit in post well before the shoot.

CFAdaptor

Teething Troubles
New edit systems are often still in need of fine tuning when they are released by manufacturers. New camcorders will not always have been tested exhaustively

Data Transfer
Typically, data recorded on the camera will be regularly transferred to a separate device to free up space for filming, to allow for

HyperDeck Studio

created and independent data backup. Using UDMA 6 Compact Flash cards, these systems have sufficient data transfer speeds to capture Pro-Res 422. The latest CF cards can reliably sustain writing at these high speeds and with rugged and waterproof products on the market this is a formidably versatile media. This level of performance enables camcorders, such as the Panasonic AG-AF101, to record at 50Mbs using 4:2:2 colour space and thereby qualify as a BBC HD broadcast camera. A new generation of recorders from the likes of BlackMagic Design, Convergent Design and Cinedeck offer uncompressed video capture – the worlds of broadcast and cinematography draw ever closer.

with every version of a computer OS. Software updates may cause difficulties with ingested material or throw up new and unexpected error messages. Examples are many, and painful: when Panasonic introduced the AVC Intra codec, it was found to be incompatible with AVID systems; in the early days RED famously caused technicians to undertake time-consuming data wrangling to make the system work smoothly; and Apple’s Final Cut Pro

instant editing of the rushes and to create secured backup copies. The most common approach is to use a laptop for this process. Armed with a card reader which connects via a USB, firewire or eSATA port, data can be transferred painlessly, with copies sent to external hard drives. New on the scene and built into the latest PCs and Macs are high-speed Thunderbolt I/O and USB 3 ports – innovations that are quickly being supported by third

party vendors such as Sonnet which are dramatically increasing transfer speeds. The plug and play architecture of modern computers makes it tempting to drag and drop files from the camera onto the machine. This is inadvisable as crews can lose the delicate file structure of the card which can make the rebuilding of the media very difficult, if not impossible. Also, this approach does not support importing spanned clips, where media is spread over two cards. This is an issue with certain editing programmes: although they feature the facility to import data from cards, there are a number of quirks and hazards that have caused productions to lose data or unnecessarily complicate the ingest process. The reliable, trusted approach is to use the manufacturer’s dedicated tools, including Panasonic’s P2 contents manager software or the Sony XDCAM clip browser
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Metadata Prepared
Pre-planning metadata is critical. Clips captured as files can be appended with additional data that can speed up post production and make archiving material more logical. Tags are automatically created in-camera such as time and date, camera name, camera operator, programme module, scene number and much more. Data technicians can also modify metadata parameters to capture the specific information they need

Panasonic P2 Browser

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In Broadcast - October/November 2011

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