Roland VC-300HD manual Do you often use magnify?

Photo 2. Image down-converted by an ordinary HD VTR and output to a TV.

Photo 3. Image output from an ordinary HD VTR via HD-SDI and down-converted by the VC-300HD. Parameters and other settings were not adjusted.

positioning, when you magnify the picture.

Do you often use magnify?

In many cases, commercial films are shot, captured to HD with telecine, and finished with SD. If you have it in HD, you can pan and zoom in SD. So, it’s great that you can magnify the picture and shift the frame a bit. In that respect, it has more functions than a simple converter. You can also do it after you get the video into a non- linear system, but then it has to do the rendering and it bogs down because of the huge file sizes.

I’ve heard that still only about 4 or 5% of

commercials are delivered in HD.

No-one’s shooting commercials directly to HD yet. The stance is that it can’t yet be done efficiently at the PC level. Although it is OK to use PCs for simple cut editing or transitions of dissolve only, computers just don’t have the power to deal with the heavy tasks of putting everything together.

What about the conversion options?

Component, SDI, DV... it seems to cover everything that the industry currently uses. I don’t need more than that. I was just about to buy an HDV deck. But the one with HD-SDI costs a serious amount of money. But now I might get a much cheaper one and use this VC-300HD for HD-SDI.

Coming at it the other way, you also gain a

path from HD-SDI to HDV.

As far as editing is concerned, you might be able to edit in HDV format. For instance, if you want to use HD-SDI for capture to Final Cut Pro, you need an input/output board. That means you need to move to a Mac Pro in a tower case. But now you can run the HDV data through this [VC- 300HD]. Even if the video is HDCAM, it lets you do the editing in HDV on a MacBook Pro. Then again, if you are working with archives, rather than taking it to HDCAM, you can do it with HDV. You can burn it on a Blu-ray recorder via FireWire. You have a number of alternatives.

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