Digital video basics

watchtherocks wrote in post #6815141
Ive got a 500mm f/4.5 I would like to be able to stick onto the camera, but since most (all affordable??) cameras have large crop factors it would almost become useless.

Why would it become useless?

Because I would be stuck with a focal length of about 4500mm. I never need more than about 1000.

watchtherocks wrote in post #6860046
Because I would be stuck with a focal length of about 4500mm. I never need more than about 1000.

4500mm??? How on earth do you figure that? A 500mm lens on a Canon crop camera has the FOV of an 800mm lens on a FF camera. I think you've got your factors mixed up. You multiply the FL of the lens by, in Canon's case, 1.6. So 1.6x500=800.

I thought it was about 7x for video cameras?

osv wrote in post #6838684
how about, rather than spending 10 hours ingesting, you could just plug a firestore into your editing system, and start working right away... or plug cheap sd cards into your system, and start working right away.

We had problems with AVCHD files on our workstations. Premiere CS3 and Premiere 6.5 don't work with those files.
They had to be captured analog on the 6.5 machine since it was much faster to capture than transcode on that machine.
Specs on that machine are P4 2.0ghz 512megs of Ram, 200Gigs, Matrox RTX.100 card, edits Long format SD perfectly.

Our other machine is a Core2Duo machine, 2GB Ram, 1.25TB, Matrox RT.X2, LG Blu-Ray Burner, Premiere CS3.

I do like the ability to edit right away with flash based devices but it doesn't work for us unless we upgrade to CS4.

Tapes do give us an instant hard copy to store right away.
50GB Blu Ray is still pricey, about $35/disc.

premiere 6.5?? holy cow, that ancient software brings back less than fond memories, lol... all that editor will handle is standard definition, and the firestore will record in sd, so those two will work together, you'll be able to edit immediately without any capturing.

same with cs3, if you shoot in sd... if you shoot in hi-def avchd, you can edit with cs3 if you transcode it to an intermediate format first... i have a 6750 core2duo, and that's how i do it, with the canopus hq codec... the files are about 7x larger, but there is enough cpu horsepower that they will play back smoothly inthe timeline.

if you aren't ready to update to cs4, there are some transcoding alternatives for less money, $100 or so?: http://blogs.adobe.com …vc_hd_revisited​.html#more

i'm thinking that if you had cs4, you could transcode, because your core2duo may not have the horsepower to work with avchd, even if cs4 supports it... you could even transcode from hd to sd, and put the transcoded sd files on the premiere 6.5 machine, to edit there.