We’ll be back with more…

The NRK is recording the Gala Concert of the Bergen International Festival. The performance is Edvard Grieg: Sonata for Violin and piano nr. 3 i C minor op. 45; Selected songs / Sonata for Cello and Piano in A minor op. 36; Ballad in G minor op. 24

The notable thing about this production is that we are testdriving the new videoservers capable of doing 720p50 uncompressed.

We are recording five cameras and the programme feed onto four homebuilt (thank you, Video4) videoservers and two HDCAM SR decks on the 30 of may 2007.

The audio is being recorded on a ProTools rig in 5.1 surround by Billy Henningsen. The audio is being fed from our nice Vista8 thru MADI to a new favourite box of ours the XLogix Delta Link HD and input to an old ProTools 6.9.1 TDM machine.

The process of getting everything up and running is always a bit more complicated than wheeling in some expensive HDCAM SR decks. We spent one day just setting everything up for the first time, next time it will be done in half a day…

Steinar Bjørlykke on the floor where he belongs.

Olav Celius ironing out the wrinkles of tri level sync and p50 recordings.

This event was truly complete with amazing talent, the artists playing are Kerstin Avemo, Leif Ove Andsnes, Truls Mørk and Julian Rachlin.

720p is the shorthand name for a category of HDTV video modes. The number 720 stands for 720 lines of vertical display resolution, while the letter p stands for progressive scan or non-interlaced. When broadcast at 60 frames per second, 720p features the highest temporal (motion) resolution possible under the ATSC standard. Progressive scanning reduces the need to prevent flicker by filtering out fine details, so spatial (sharpness) resolution is much closer to 1080i than the number of scan lines would suggest.

Read more about 720p50 at Wikipedia, which also links to this pdf document from EBU recommending 720p50 as a standard for HDTV.

This time we’ll adapt the employed techniques to the P2 workflow with Panasonic’s HVX200 camera. We’ll concentrate on the remaining 720p50 DVCPRO HD format that is not yet directly supported by Final Cut Pro 5.1.2.

Until recently any user of Final Cut Pro had to assume in general that the HD formats 720p25 and 720p50 were not supported. With Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 there is at least now support for native 720p25 HDV and 720p25 DVCPRO HD. However this article examines ways to get advanced 720p50 support for Final Cut Pro using third party video cards. This is especially interesting for users of Panasonic DVCPRO HD and JVC HDV equipment that want to shoot and edit in 50p. The workflow detailed here should be applicable to the following devices: