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converting HDCam to Prores 422 – any gotchas?
Hi All
I’m about to pay an edit facility to convert a project which is on HDCam tape (1080i, 25fps) to ProRes 422, to be delivered on a separately purchased FW drive.
This is in order to allow me to cut an HD trailer at mininmal cost on my own system and get some frame grabs for publicity purposes at optimum quality for the buck.
My system is an MBP (3G RAM, the ATI 1600 version, 2.33 C2D chip) with a Caldigit SVR2Duo running on an expresscard adapter. (I’d edit from that obviously), and FC Studio 2.
Are there any gotchas I should beware of in this process? When specifying the order should I stick to exactly the same settings as the original tape footage (1080i25 I believe) or could I ask the facility to convert while digitizing to 1080P (deinterlacing and upressing)?
The trailer will be used in a cinema/market context (both transferred to 35mm and displayed as JPEG2000 on a Doremi D-cinema server), so if I can work progressively it would be worth it. Or would it be better to digitize the footage exactly as is, finalize my trailer and then transcode that 90 secs (or whatever) when it’s cooked? (The original project has already been encoded for cinema use for festivals etc.)
(I assume that since the edit facility can do ProRes (not sure what sort of capture card they use) and I have FCP 2 that there is no point in going for H264?)
Thanks !
Robert
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3 Replies
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You can’t edit in H264 as it’s a delivery codec. ProRes is much better.
I would have the facility capture in the native form (25i) and then you edit and when you are done you can do a deinterlace if you want with something like revisionfx’s fields kit. That way the onus is on you and not on the people capturing the footage if there’s problems. You can also control the pipeline, but that’s how I like to work and not necessarily how you would.
How are you going to monitor all of this footage?
Jeremy
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I would also add… are you sure you’re footage is actually interlaced?
I see stuff all the time that people tell me is 50i, and technically, it may be when it’s on tape – but when you look at the frames, it’s 25p. So you might not need to do any de-interlacing anyway. How was it captured, do you know?
(Who would shoot interlace video for film delivery these days, when progressive cameras are readily available?)
But if it was shot interlaced, I would agree with Jeremy – get it in native form and control the process yourself.
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Thanks for that – progressive cameras were not so available when the thing was shot. It was in early 2005 on a Sony 750 HDcam which I think can only do interlaced (could be wrong – I think you only got progressive on the 900, which was not available to the production). Big mistake not to shoot 24 though, bad advice from lazy post facilities used to working in PAL!
My system should cope with HD prores no bother, right?
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