Best Way to Bring HDV Footage Into FCP

[Zane Barker]

Your questions have been asked numerous numerous times. A quick search of the forum before posting is always best.

Basic answer is use ProRes.

**Hindsight is always 1080p**

[Shane Ross]

[Harold Eastman] “what’s the best work flow for getting footage from my aging Sony A1U (HDV 1440X1080 60i) into a ProRes 422 timeline at 1920X1080 23.98p. “

Get a capture card and an HDV deck with SDI outputs. That’s the only way to CAPTURE HDV as full raster 1920×1080 ProRes. There is a way to do it via firewire, but that only gets you 1440×1080…and if you need to recapture the footage due to a lost drive, or revisiting a project. But here’s how to do it:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/poisson_chris/hdv-prores.php

[Harold Eastman] “And while I’m at it, what’s the best work flow for getting 1920X1080 23.98p H.264 footage from my Canon T2i into the same timeline?”

This way: Tapeless Workflow for FCP 7 Tutorial

Download and hack the EOS Log and Transfer utility. OR…after you backup the footage, use the RGBto5D software, magic bullet Grinder, MPEG STREAMCLIP…Compressor…

Shane

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[Harold Eastman]

Shane,

Thanks for your thoughts. I really should have read more widely in this thread before posting. My apologies.

Because I’ll be retiring the A1U soon, I’m reluctant to invest in a capture card.

Unless you see any obvious issues that will come back to bite me later, I think I’ll just go with ingesting HDV with ProRes 422, dropping the resulting files into my 23.98 timeline and then rendering.

I’ve experimented with this approach this weekend, outputting to a 720p H.264 file and everything seemed fine.

As for H.264 ingest, I’ll follow your tutorial.

Again, thanks for your comments.