Jordan’s Furniture Warwick Sony F3

A while back I wrote about my experiences editing Jordan’s Furniture. They were one of the first New England companies to broadcast their spots in HD. I can’t comment on if they were one of the first to shoot their spots on the Sony F3, but I can say that this campaign for the new Warwick store did.

When I was informed the new Warwick spots were going to be shot on the F3, I had a distinct concern as far as the post process was concerned. All Jordan’s spots are shot in 1080/23.976fps. When the camera is the Sony F900 HDCAM, a JH-3 deck is used to do a pull-down and the footage is actually digitized at 1080i/59.94fps. This is great since all the deliverables need to be in that format. With the F3, the footage is XDCAM EX coming off SxS cards, so there is no way to have a piece of hardware do a pull-down on the footage.

You can read in my original post how quick the turn around times are on the spots, so I had limited time to make a decision how I was going to deal with the footage. I knew that the first step was going to be to use Avid AMA to link the footage in the Avid Symphony. What I didn’t know was where I was going to start as far as the master project went. 1080p/23.976? 1080i/59.94fps? The footage would link AMA into either project, but didn’t know if I should edit in 24 and then reformat to 60i after the edit or before. Should I transcode the footage before working?

After a thorough, yet fast paced, discovery phase I came to the conclusion that I was over thinking it. All I had to do was create a 1080i/59.94fps project, AMA the footage into a bin and edit in that format. Avid automatically does a pulldown motion effect on any mixed frame rates on the timeline. I will say though that in my opinion the pulldown that was done with the JH-3 HDCAM deck is more “solid” then the software based motion effects you get in Avid.

For those out there looking for some info on the lens configuration on the Sony F3, I can tell you this. A zoom lens was used. Robert Magro was the DP on this and while he said it would have been great to use prime lenses, the quick changes in setups coupled with the dolly shots warranted the need for a zoom. This campaign was shot during the last initial phase of construction at the store so there was very limited time with all the setups. I have worked on another video with the F3 in which primes were used and there is a definite difference, but I also believe overall the F3 holds up no matter what lens you use. One of these days I’ll get some footage with S-Log.