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HDV downconvert in deck or blackmagic?
Hi all. I’m trying to work out a workflow to shoot in HDV and deliver on SD. Does anyone know if the quality is better if I downconvert HDV to DV through a deck like Sony HVR-M25 during capture and edit in DV or edit in HDV and downconvert to SD through Blackmagic Extreme upon online? The show will be graded in FCP. Doing it the former way is definately easier to edit with from the troubles I’ve read with HDV on the cow. Any thoughts?
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5 Replies
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if you downconvert from the black magic I believe you would need to do it uncompressed 8 or 10-bit. (thats what I would do)
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Thanks Borjis. But what about the quality for a downconvert through deck? Would they quality make much difference?
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I have not yet compared them directly but I can tell you that the downconversion via the black magic hardware is stunning.
I think the downconversion from the JVC camera or deck has a bit of aliasing by comparison.
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Ming,
Editing HDV natively isn’t so bad if you have a fast mac and a DeckLink or Kona card that can let you watch what you’re doing on a monitor. When you’re done, you downconvert for delivery, but you can also quickly make yourself an HD master (not trying to pick the HDV is /isn’t really HD fight). This should let you avoid going back to original footage just to get an HD copy. Recapturing footage is where I’ve had a LOT of my problems with HDV, so I’d suggest avoiding it if you can.
A lot of the COW folks capture HDV as DVCPro HD to avoid a lot of the long GOP pitfalls of the HDV format. I can’t remember off hand if the deck you mentioned has HD-SDI out, or if that’s the next deck up, but that may be a deal-breaker. Maybe someone wiser could speak to the virtues (or lack thereof) of using that workflow capturing over component inputs rather than SDI.Zak
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Thanks guys! Anyone tried Blackmagic Intensity yet? It allows HDV to be captured as DVCProHD through HDMI. Heard anything bad about it?
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