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Can i work with HDV footage in a DV project?
Hi guys
I did a 2 day shoot over the weekend, using 3 Canon A1 HDV cameras. There is about 33 hours of HDV material to ingest. My final output is SD DVD and i was planning to shoot in DV, capture regular DV PAL, and then convert to the pro Res codec to enable a “quickish” edit on my 2.33ghz 17″ MBP.
However, one of my friends is lending me his 8 core Mac Pro for 3 weeks and suggested to shoot in HDV, capture HDV pro Res and then output the final project to SD DVD.
I will be picking up his machine and commencing the mammoth task of ingest in the next 6 hours.
Using the latest version of FCP, can i capture HDV then work down in a DV project? I would like to reframe some shots and also use the difference in frame size as a another possible camera (eg…camera 1 footage at 100% then cut to the same camera 1 but at 75% or whatever scale is required to fill the DV frame.
I will be using the FCP multicam plugin. My main task is to get down most, if not all of the edit before i need to give the 8 core Mac Pro back, but if i need to continue editing, do you think my MBP will be upto the task? Do you think i should render out some low res files as proxies before i give it back, to allow a smoother work flow, and when the edit is locked off, substitute with the full rez files.
Thanks guys
M.
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1 Reply
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sorry if this is a bit late…but my suggestion is to take your HDV tapes and down-convert them to an Anamorphic( on the Easy Settings) project – machines like the Sony 25 or even cameras mostly have a downconvert to SD facility. Why? because even with your pal’s tower, the machine will render and process far quicker in the SD mode. Also, I do a lot of multiclip work, and often find even in SD when you have more than 4 cameras going into the project simultaneously, there can be playback stutter and drop out in multiclip even in SD – so its far more likely to happen in HDV. And think – if the shape is the same in anamorphic, as you are playing out to SD anyway, why not go this route?
Paul runs Competent Artistes, a very busy small Johannesburg-based production company working in broadcast and corporate for everything from governments to oil and mining companies, funky radio stations and music companies and pro bono for Nelson Mandela and his Children’s Fund. Competent Artistes is CNN’s outside production company for Southern Africa, Paul reports regularly on-air with company-produced reports for CNN. Paul relaxes by racing highly modified ATV quad bikes illegally in midnight quarter mile street races against M3s on nitro outside the Mozambican Parliament, a beautiful straight stretch of tar in Maputo.
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