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Capturing Mini DV for use in offline/online HD workflow
Greetings all,
I would really appreciate some advice on how best to capture Mini DV for eventual online use in an HD project. I’m new to Avid, so my apologies in advance if this is really basic!
We’ve received some Mini DV tapes and will only have access to them for a few days, so need to capture them in a way that would be suitable later when we go to online. We’re currently working offline with DNxHD 36 (project is 1080p23.976) and will be onlining in HD for a TV delivery.
What’s the best way to capture the footage in this situation? Would it be fine to capture in DV25, using firewire? Or would some kind of uncompressed capture be better? Or upconversion to HD?
I’d really appreciate any and all suggestions!
Thanks!
Alex
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6 Replies
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Thanks for your response Shane! Sorry, I’m realizing now I was a little unclear.
These tapes are an SD archival source that will be used in the film, but the rest of the footage is HD and so the final film will be onlined in HD. So considering this SD footage will eventually be included in an HD sequence that goes out for color correction, will capturing at DV25 via firewire suffice? Or would it be better to capture 1:1 via SDI?
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Will you be doing the offline/online workflow? Or capture the HD footage at full res to start?
Shane
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We’re capturing the HD material in full-res from the start, but at DNxHD 36 for offline editing. At the end we’ll conform the DNxHD 36 sequence to DNxHD 175x for online.
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There is nothing worse than people wanting their tapes back before you are done with them. I would consider cloning the tapes if it isn,t too cost prohibitive. At some point they obviously need to be up converted to HD. If you have a teranex or some such device, perhaps up convert to HDCam, and use those as your source tapes. Digitize them for your of line work low, the uprez for online…same as everything else. Without copies of the tapes you run the risk of having to ask for the tapes back at some point due to an unfortunate accident, or hardware malfunction. I usually tell clients that I need the source footage until the job is done.
Glenn
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Thanks for your advice, Glenn! Yeah, unfortunately this is one of those situations where we only have one chance to work with the tapes, so to be safe, we’ll clone them for now. That makes sense, to just treat the clones like any other offline media for now. Hopefully later on we can run them through a teranex-type device to upconvert, as you’ve suggested. At least this way we’ll have options for things like this in the future. Thanks!
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