Doing an offline edit with HD footage

[Jeremy Garchow]

Set your deck to downconvert to DV and capture dv. Then when it comes time, media manage your project to HDV and recapture @ HDV or higher.

Jeremy

[Llewelyn Roderick]

Dear Peter

Although Jeremy’s workflow is the correct I would strongly advise against it. I am in the middle of a 94min Documentary Online that was shot in HDV and offlined following the DV capture route. All I can say is that it’s taken us 7 days to autoconform (recapture the final EDL) with the HDV shoot tapes. It took 2 days to capture 75% of the footage and another 5 days to capture the other 25%.
First sign of trouble was FCP crashing when we attempted to batch capture one of the ‘problem’ tapes.
Eventually what I managed to figure out after many hours of reading and talking to other Post people was that the process of downconverting in-camera from HDV to DV disguises TC breaks that may exist in HDV footage. The HDV’s long GOP structure means that you do not have frame based TC but like the visual data, the TC is calculated on the fly. To the best of my knowledge and in comparing some of the tapes, this is what i found. A DV clip that was continuous in the offline was actually made up of two or more seperate HDV clips. This was only the beginning. At least 20% of the footage we digitised without hiccup ended up not being frame accurate. IE there must have been more code breaks.

Anyway, avoid if you can. Hope this helps in some way.

regards

Llewelyn

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro. Decklink HD Pro, 1.8TB raid, HDLink, Sony PVM20 and 23″ Apple Cinema Display…
Fireworks Edit

Llewelyn @ Fireworks
HD for indies post production
http://www.fireworksfilms.co.za