Can you “re-digitize” from AVCHD to Prores and maintain timecode?

[Isaac Brillant]

Oh, also…

Do you do any sort of backup archival on DVDs or Bluerays? I’m wondering if thats a common workflow, when completing a project, to burn all the AVCHD files to DVD. It ought to be something like 2 or 3 DVDs per hour of footage? I guess it wouldn’t be as easy with ProresLT or DVCPro (if using an HPX) though.

Thanks

[John Christie]

[Isaac Brillant] “So, when you opened log & transfer, and changed the preferences to transcode as Prores HQ , and selected the offline sequence and asked it to batch capture, were you batch capturing from the ProRes regular clips to ProRes HQ, or from the AVCHD clips? It makes sense that it would keep the timecode from Prores regular to Prores HQ, but I’m trying to avoid having to archive all this Prores material”

When redigitizing, FCP goes back to the original AVCHD files, I’m not transcoding from Prores LT to regular or HQ. So the bottom line is you can safely delete your Prores files after editing, knowing that you can always transcode the original files again and preserve all the timecode.

[Isaac Brillant] “About the frame size, maybe it’s cheating, but the reason I was thinking about capturing and editing in 1080, and later downconverting the sequence it to 720, was so that in a talking head interview, I could – in a pinch, blow up the Medium CU by 30% and cheat it as a new CU shot, so that I can cut from one shot to the same shot, without it being obvious. “

Yeah, I’ve done that cheat as well. It works reasonably well, but not something I would rely on. I haven’t noticed any aliasing issues when down-converting 1080 to 720, but I haven’t looked closely at it.

I also backup files to data DVDs, one 16GB card spans across 3 DVDs using Toast. It’s time consuming, but nothing wrong with being anal when it comes to your data. USB rives are pretty cheap though, buy two and keep one offsite for maximum data protection.

I’m head of post-production for Paperny Films in Vancouver, we don’t work the HMC150 at work. I use the HMC150 on my own pet projects.

Cheers

John C