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HD & DV footage workflow
I’m about to begin a feature doc which has around 300 tapes of footage pre-shot on DV, and everything shot from this point forward will be on HD-Cam. Producer wants to finish in HD. My question is what is the most affordable and efficient way of managing these two master sources.
I can convince the shooting crew to shoot HD at 29.97 fps which allows us to avoid the mixing of frame rates. Still, our issue is figuring out how to do this whole thing cheaply.
The option to downconvert all the HD tapes to DV is not great due to the dubbing charges for each tape.
The other options I see are to 1. Rent an HD deck to load the HD footage. Then I’m not sure I can view the HD and DV footage in the same timelines.
2. Dub the HD footage to HDV and load via an HDV deck which we can buy. Not sure what these go for, but figured it’d be cheaper than renting an HD deck over and over. Still, same issue- can we view HD and DV in the same timelines.Any thoughts?
nate smith
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3 Replies
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Boy, I don’t envy you.
If you intend on delivering HD, will the client/network accept DV sources blown up to the HD size? DV>HD is a BIG blowup.
What you need to do first is test your options. Capture some HDCAM footage via a HD capture card (need high speed RAID arrays for this) and then capture some DV. First via firewire, then via the Capture Card as HDCAM (8-bit uncompressed). There is a software solution to blow up DV to HD from http://www.redgiant.com called INSTANT HD. See what that does and how the quality looks compared to the HDCAM. And see what the quality of the DV footage captured with the card looks like compared.
If it is something you can live with, then I suggest capturing all your footage at DV resolution for offlining, then recapturing later at HD resolution when your picture is locked.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
You can capture the HDCam tapes as DV footage on the fly. Kona and Blackmagic cards provide this feature. Since you’re shooting at 29.97, the timecode will be the same. So you can do all you offline editing on the same timeline w/o rendering. When you do the finishing, you can rent the deck again and batch recapture the HD footage in HD.
Sean
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If you want to do bulk up-res of DV, which it sounds like you’ll want to for the final HD product, I’d recommend finding a post house with a Teranex box or similar, and just get it all into HD. If money is no object, you could try Lowry in Burbank (https://www.dts.com/digital_images/), they have a proprietary up-resing process that runs on a bank of 100 G5s and produces the most amazing results I’ve ever seen.
John
https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/
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