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FCP HD/SD question
I looked around for a similar question to this, but didn’t see it. Here’s my situation – I’m about to shoot an HD feature. I have FCP6, so I’m all set up to cut 1080i material at ProRes 422.
Problem is, I don’t have a terrific HD monitor with AJA system and all that business.
What I do have is a beautiful CRT SD monitor.
My situation is that I cannot set up a proper HD monitor output with the budget I have.I was wondering, and hopefully some people know the proper answer to this –
Let’s say I was to prep all my material at ProRes 422, and then cut it in an SD timeline (while fully aware that each shot would need to be rendered) – and I was to add my color correction and magic bullet work to this SD timeline, so that I could view all this work on a nice monitor, and then once the feature is complete, copy all this work to an HD timeline, and restore the clip sizes to 100 percent (as placing it in an SD timeline will automatically reduce its size) for mastering.
Will my color work that was done in SD still be accurate once the video is HD, or will many details and nuances exist that will make my color work less effective, or at times excessive?
I appreciate any and all thoughts on this.
Thank you!
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5 Replies
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[Aaron Barrocas] “Let’s say I was to prep all my material at ProRes 422, and then cut it in an SD timeline “
You don’t need to do this with an AJA card. You cut in HD and set your AJA card to downconvert the signal to SD during playback. It’s all realtime. So edit and color grade in the HD timeline while monitoring SD.
[Aaron Barrocas] “Will my color work that was done in SD still be accurate once the video is HD, or will many details and nuances exist that will make my color work less effective, or at times excessive? “
HD allows much more color than SD so if you grade using the SD monitor, you’ll have more muted colors when you see your work back in HD.
Flanders Scientific has an incredible color grading monitor for $2,495. The FSI 1760W. We’re running one of those now in our third suite and are installing two fo their 2450W models in the other two suites this week.
You can click on the yellow banners on the left side of the forum to learn more.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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[Aaron Barrocas] “I’m about to shoot an HD feature. I have FCP6, so I’m all set up to cut 1080i material at ProRes 422.
Problem is, I don’t have a terrific HD monitor with AJA system and all that business.
What I do have is a beautiful CRT SD monitor.
My situation is that I cannot set up a proper HD monitor output with the budget I have.”How important is this project to you? Is it important at all? Important enough to maybe want to do a proper job of it? Would you like to maybe sell it to someone for theatrical, TV, even direct to DVD?
If the answer to any of these is “yes”, then maybe you should invest a little money into making it more successful, and making your life with it easier.
If you only spend 6 months of 40 hour weeks on this project you will spend over a thousand hours living with it. That doesn’t account for OT, the time spent discussing it with the director on the phone over the weekend, the time you spend obsessing over it while trying to get to sleep, in the shower, stuck in traffic on the freeway, etc.
It would be better if all of this off-hour worry was about how to tell the story, not about how to get your system to work more smoothly. It would be better if you could complain to the director that you can’t work faster because he’s such a pain, not that you can’t work faster because you chose to pinch pennies and now your workflow is ca-ca.
A Kona LHi card will run you about $1500, a Decklink HD Extreme about a grand. You can get a used PVM-14L5 on eBay for $500 and up, a PVM20-L5 could be had for under $2k. Or you could buy the Flanders that Walter recommends. The $2k-$5k that you spend on a HD capture card & monitor will save you hundreds of hours of render time, and will give you a much more accurate preview of your work, so that your end result will be better and more easily arrived at.
Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/ -
Check it out…everyone has good ideas fir you and I totally agree that you should invest a little. I just got the MXO2 from Matrox. Does all the cross conversion and everything AND let’s you use a standard HDMI HDTV as a full broadcast monitor. Costs $1595 ( or you can pay a little more and get super fast h.264 encoding. Worth looking at!
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I second that!
The my MXO2 has really delivered!
I use my HDMI for all my previews. The quality of Matrox’s up and down converts are FANTASTIC!
I recommend it to anyone of my FCP peers!
An Artist At Heart.
Life is made of moments… -
Hi
Interesting workflow!
So if I understand correctly. if I have an SD delivery in 625, I can ingest, edit, grade and online to HD. Then instead of playing out a HD master and then cloning it to a Downconverted Digi.
I can just change the output of my Kona to Downcon and it will give me an SD master.
Is this correct?
I like this idea if it does work, as opposed to ingesting ProRes 625 and outputing same. Working in HD would be much better obviously.
Thanks
H
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