Downconverting HDV to SD

[Jerry Alto]

Chris- I think I can address what you are looking for. I edit on a show that has been shot on Betacam SP over the last 10 years. The last two years we have edited on FCP 8-bit uncompressed going thru an aja ioLA card and have been really pleased with the results. But the old 400A Beta SP is getting a bit old and tired and our cameramen feel much older after lugging the camera and batteries to the mountaintop (its a hunting show).

So we bought a Z-1 as a second camera to test for this hunting season. On the first shoot we shot on HDV with the 4:3 screen safe bars on the viewfinder. For post we went out edgecropped analogue component directly into the aja 8-bit uncompressed so it would match all of our existing prebuilt media and work seemlessly in inside FCP (no rendering).

The footage is flat out BETTER than Betacam SP. Period. AND way, way better than DV (we had used a prosumer DV camera as our second cameras (ie. Sony 150). The HDV footage had more color depth, more exposure latitude and cleaner picture.

We are dealing with the hassles of no machine control and no timecode from the original tapes. Hopefully there will be a beefier deck out soon with 422 machine control and (can I say it) SDI out!

To summarize…. we have now purchased a second Z-1 and guess what…. the crew is out with both Z-1s and the 400A is sitting here behind me in the editing room.

[Graeme Nattress]

It should look like very good 1/3″ CCD video. It won’t look as good as say, digibeta or DVCpro50 shot on a 2/3″ camera, but it should look better than DV shot with a 1/3″ camera, and you’ve got real widescreen to boot.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Mark Maness]

Hey Jerry… Its good to know that there is someone out there doing the same type of program as my company. We do hunting and fishing shows and your absolutely right. The Sony HDV is a wonderful compromise to the heavy BetaSP cameras. Myself and my cohort are getting older these days and having a camera on your shoulder for 8 – 12 hours is really tiring and painful.

Let me say that I completely agree with you about your statement concerning machine control and SDI. But we don’t have any problems at all with using firewire for my machine control and I get timecode thru it, too. I’m not sure what capture you are using but I bet its an AJA IO. If so, just add another firewire card to your computer and use it for machine control. Works great. But I have to add that the HVR-M10U deck has a very sluggish machine control, therefore, making logging tapes a little time consuming.

Here’s a tip… Have you ever had problems with your cameras not being able to run when the temps are below 32 degrees? We have but that’s an artifact of a cost effective camera. We had the same problem with our Canon XL1s. We wanted something beefer than BetaSP but digital. So we ended up purchasing the Sony XDCAM series as our main camera. Its a tapeless format using disks and has absolutely no problems with humidity, heat, cold, or extreme conditions such as helicopter shoots or boat running shots while in the boat. You can mess this thing up. Its absolutely awesome. Oh yeah, the most important thing is that it has a pre-record function that can record up to 12 seconds before you press the record button. No more missed shots of wildlife or hooksets on a fishing show. And you can mix HDV with it pretty well. If your looking for an upgrade, give XDCAM a look.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Arwa Merchant]

Hello all
I have been reading and following all the threads related to HDV worflow. I am in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I am working on an hour long documentray shot completely on HDV using the Sony camera. I have about 22 hours of footage, which I will be looking at tomorrow.
I wanted some suggestions on my workflow. I am working with FCP 5, a G5 dual processor, 2GB, no capture card, but can get one if needed.
I have been deciding to edit native HDV, capture all the footage via firewire onto 500GB FW800 drives. But it seems like almost everyone prefers converting the HDV footage to an i-frame format. but what’s the point of having the native codec, if you are going to convert everything.
Secondly, considering the amount of footage I have, i can’t convert it to a 10-bit uncompressed format. It would take way too much time.
My next option is to downconvert my HDV footage during capture to DV-PAL. Am I going to lose a lot of picture quality? What are the cons if I stay native?
My master has to be a digibeta PAL.
Please advise me on my workflow. I don’t have a capture card, but I can get one if it is essential to my edit nd the final output.
Thank You.

[Arwa Merchant]

Hello all
I have been reading and following all the threads related to HDV worflow. I am in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I am working on an hour long documentray shot completely on HDV using the Sony camera. I have about 22 hours of footage, which I will be looking at tomorrow.
I wanted some suggestions on my workflow. I am working with FCP 5, a G5 dual processor, 2GB, no capture card, but can get one if needed.
I have been deciding to edit native HDV, capture all the footage via firewire onto 500GB FW800 drives. But it seems like almost everyone prefers converting the HDV footage to an i-frame format. but what’s the point of having the native codec, if you are going to convert everything.
Secondly, considering the amount of footage I have, i can’t convert it to a 10-bit uncompressed format. It would take way too much time.
My next option is to downconvert my HDV footage during capture to DV-PAL. Am I going to lose a lot of picture quality? What are the cons if I stay native?
My master has to be a digibeta PAL.
Please advise me on my workflow. I don’t have a capture card, but I can get one if it is essential to my edit nd the final output.
Thank You.