Capturing via HDMI vs FW

[Callum Mclay]

Hi Martin

Depending on what you want to do with your footage will affect which is the better capture method for you to use.

If you have already recorded your footage to HDV tape in the camera, then your footage has already been colour subsampled, and much of the information lost. If you only wish to work with HDV footage, you may as well use Firewire as a quick and easy capture method.

If, on the other hand, you want to capture to a more intermediate format for editing, then you can use HDMI to re-capture your HDV footage into an uncompressed of MJPEG etc format.

Your footage will still have a HDV quality to it, as the information has already been lost in the original recording. However with Fire Wire capture, you do not have the option to re-capture to another format, for easier editing.

Callum McLay
Technical Support Consultant
Blackmagic Design EMEA

[Martin Vincent]

Thank Callum

I was wondering if there was a speed increase if I was to convert all my footages from HDV to BM for editing, and what would be the fastest way to output (format and workflow) a intermediary footage to send to Squeeze to compress?

[Callum Mclay]

Hi Martin

It really depends what you define as a speed increase. An increase in the speed of your workflow, or do you mean an increase in the speed at which you can process the footage (ie realtime playback etc).

HDV is a native encoding standard to Premiere CS3, and so the software copes very well with the decoding of the footage on the fly, if you have a system with good processing power.

Bear in mind that if you capture via HDMI to BMD uncompressed, then your data rate will shoot up and you will need a decent size disk array to cope with the extra bandwidth. You will have HDV like quality, but you will lose the advantage of the small data rate.

I perhaps need to understand your workflow a bit better to give any solid opinions, but maybe the quickest workflow would be to work in HDV for the edit, and then render what you need into an uncompressed .AVI, which you can then supply to Squeeze for compression to other formats?

These are just my opinions, but unfortunately it really comes down to trial and error to determine what is the most efficient workflow for yourself. MAybe you could give me an over view of what it is you would like to do from start to finish?

Callum McLay
Technical Support Consultant
Blackmagic Design EMEA