4000 Pro

[roger915]

My 4000 Pro came in today with 1.1C
It is fast.
Loaded a few sceenes in HD and the footage looks great.
Crashed a few times.
Miss some of the software not ready for the 4000.
Come on CB Paint 2
Will send more info soon.
Who has one to share information
Roger

[joesmetana]

Roger I set mine up last Sunday. The major problem with this new unit is the record program. It does not recognirze the signal breaks on the tape
to automatically stop and record as the Solitaire did. I had to baby sit for an hour and a half restarting the record after a break in the tape. I also had to continuously back up the tape to prevent loss of footage. THe other problem is the Bluray burner. The bluray disk I made will not play on any commercially made DVD player, Not even on the S4000 Pro!!
Good Luck!!
Joe.

[chetdavis]

Joe,

I expect you have already talked with Support about your question/issue regarding tape breaks -- are you talking about a physical section of non-recorded tape? My Renommee/Solitaire would not allow that either as there is a break in the video signal. But I should mention there are a few reports of some anomolies with cameras and our Support Team is chasing down now. I am told we are expecting an update to the Bogart SE OS as soon as the end of this week - we will post news as it is available

THe other problem is the Bluray burner. The bluray disk I made will not play on any commercially made DVD player, Not even on the S4000 Pro

The Blu-ray disk you can burn in the current S4000 units will play in a PS3 as well as a PC that also has a Blu-ray drive. I am happy to inform you that the ability to play back in your S4000 unit is right around the corner with the release of the Full Featured Bogart SE OS -- this will include not only the DVD player (both SD and Blu-ray) but also the substantive archive functions touted earlier with these new models.

I have just been working with my S-4000 PRO model for the last day and a half and am loving it. As Roger pointed out - the image quality is great -- being able to edit HDV and SE in real time and viewing it on my 37" LCD monitor ( my main problem now is that I spend time admiring my videography instead of editing the program ).

[joesmetana]

Chet, I am talking about the break in the tape signal. I do not shoot weddings, where you run a tape from beginning to end without going back to review the footage. I generally shoot vaious world locations over the course of a week or two. At the end of each day I review the footage taken that day which creates a break in the signal on the tape in between this and the next days shoot. The Solitaire, when put in record mode recognized the signal breaks, stopped recording, and automatically began recording again when it recognized a tape signal. I spoke with Justin about this and the fact that the bluray can only be played on the Sony Game Machine, Play Station. He told me that Germany is aware of this and is working to give us the same capability we had on the Solitaire. He was going to check and let me know when the fix will be done.
Regards, Joe

[Volker]

Hey Joe,
if you are planning to review the footage at the end of each day, I highly would recommend to record 60minutes of black to a new tape before you use it for the first time. By this you can avoid having breaks on the tape at all.
Many cameras have a feature to "find" the last piece of footage on the tape so it automatically rewinds to that position and you can continue shooting right after that last frame.

Blu-ray discs can not be played back on standard DVD players. This is not possible. Although you can create standard DVDs with the Arabesk 4 software from your HD projects. But those DVDs will be downconverted to SD resolution. Those DVDs can be played back almost everywhere.
On the other hand we are working on a Blu-ray authoring tool, so you will be able to create Blu-ray discs that can be played back on the modern Blu-ray players (that support playback of those discs).
Today the Playstation3 is an excellent playback device for almost every SD- and HD content you feed it with.

[HansJoachimKoenig]

Joe, before reviewing your day's shots just do 5 or 10 seconds of groundshooting with your cam.
For next day shots you stop the cam in play mode after seeing the first picture of the ground shot
and switch to record mode. Now you will have an ascending timecode on your tape and no breaks
when recording to 4000 Pro.
As Volker said, many cams can detect the end of your last recording and start from there.
But to my knowledge this function is only available if you don't eject the tape from your cam
and insert again.
Recording 60 minutes of black is time & record/play head wasting.

[joesmetana]

Thanks for your comments on recording with the S4000 Pro. While the "fixs" you propose are OK, the easiest is to not review the tape until the end. I hope MacroSystems is going to upgrade the S4000 Pro so that it can accomplish the same features as the Solitaire ie: read tape breaks and auto record plus play bluray DVDs.
Joe.

[roger915]

When recording HD to the machine, it is impossible to capture clips on the fly because when you stop recording "Finalizing" comes up while the tape is still running.

When using a HDMI monitor as monitor 2, there are no analog video outputs, example, trying to send something to tape with a S-Video cable will not work. You can burn a DVD only. Or change screen 2 back to video to get outputs!

When in analog SD or HD, you have to render crossfades and other transitions that did not need to be rendered on other machines.

When using a LG 720p monitor (and as far as I can tell everything around 19" is only 720p) Using a 1080I screen setting will cause the audio to be out of synch.

The Titler crashes VERY often.

I am unable to send audio clips to a CD, every time I try the machine simply does not do anything.

When going to batch render the Storyboard, even when effects are created and you play it from the storyboard, a second render screen pops up that says "Creating HDV Material" after this is done, changing anything on the storyboard causes this process to start all over again and it takes twice as long as the length of the storyboard. So the only way to batch render effects without having to sit through this every time, is to click "Cancel" when it gets to that point. The effects will remain rendered.

Sometimes when recording HD the machine will act like it's recording, but when you go to the edit screen there is no scene in the scene bin.

Backing up a storyboard to a DVD plays wonderfully in a Playstation 3

The front USB port does work, at least with a trackball, but the actuall connection is several inches inside the machine making it very hard to connect.

The machine is very quiet.

Sometimes when recording HD, the machine has lagged so far behind that after clicking to stop recording, you have wait and watch for the footage to catch back up before the machine will do anything.

When recording HD, you must sit at the machine the whole time. Any glitch seen or unseen will stop the record and it will not start again automatically.

Keep in mind that this is just personal experience, and I haven't put all these issues to a complete test, and we need the rest of the software to become useable.

It is so fast!

Roger

[TimKennelly]

Nice full hands on use report Roger, keep it up.

Regarding the rendering of transitions, this is because we no longer have built in hardware (discontinued Ccube) for this so the software has to do it.

SmartRendering will take care of that, have you tried activating that?

The input delay thing seems to be camcorder specific and so I suspect you are using Canons?

My personal experience with my Sony cams is "on the fly" with less than a second finalizing at footage stoppage.

I agree with the HDV breaks require staffed observation as it just flat out stops and it's done until you do something, that is very disappointing as I tended to use down times for input such as meals, sleep and now you come back to find it might have only recorded five minutes and then stopped. Argghh!

I use the two monitor mode with a 1080i monitor in DVI 1920x1080 mode and the audio stays in synch fine for me so it must be an individual monitor compatibility (or setting) issue.

I have not ran into that fake recording issue, sometimes it takes a couple of attempts to get Record engaged (timecode running), but if it does it has always given me results in the scene bin.

[Volker]

just 3 comment from my side (I could write much more but I don't have the time now)

The Titler crashes VERY often.

Please add the title effect to the storyboard before you enter the text. If there is no title effect, it may crash quickly.

The input delay thing seems to be camcorder specific and so I suspect you are using Canons?

I guess this delay depends on character of the footage. If you shot a static item in front of a black wall, it will finalise in no time but when you have details and motion, it may take a while to encode the images.

Sometimes when recording HD the machine will act like it's recording, but when you go to the edit screen there is no scene in the scene bin.

Maybe you have cancelled the finalisation by clicking on the right trackball button !?

Volker