H1 - Wafian/Cineform Support

Two pieces of good ultra-geeky news for H1 and Final Cut Pro owners and users. The Wafian HR-1 Recorder now supports the 24F and 30F frame modes of the Canon XL-H1 camera and removes 3:2 pulldown for true 24FPS support. The Wafian HR-1 is a hard-drive based recording deck in the same ballpark as the $100,000 HDCAM-SR deck at a much more attractive price point ($15,000) and even cheaper than a AJ-1200 DVCPro deck...and it's a tapeless workflow.

The other good news is that CineForm, the codec the Wafian HR-1 uses, will soon be releasing support for Quicktime. CineForm currently only supports Windows PCs because it utilizes specific instruction sets built into Intel processors. We suspect that CineForm Quicktime will require one of the new Intel based Macintosh systems for this reason. Apple is slated to release new Intel PowerMacs sometime this summer.

This bodes well for our upcoming feature production of SHADOW FALLS. We have been researching methods in which we could leverage the HD-SDI output of the H1. Most HDCAM-SR decks are extremely expensive to rent and aren't field production friendly (with the exception of the SRW1). Other hard-drive RAID based solutions require hauling around a mobile IT center on wheels. The Wafian easily provides the most attractive solution.

It's now a question of whether their Quicktime support is around the corner or not.

Shout out to MobileWhack and HD4Indies for the headsup.