Have HDV Camera But No Blu-ray etc. Current Shooting And Editing Options ?

[Ian Brown]

Thanks Jason.

Two questions arise from your (and other people’s comments):-

1. Being lazy, in the ten minutes of testing I have done so far, I have simply chosen File>Export>QuickTime Movie before authoring. Will I really get a noticeable improvement if I use Compressor instead ?

2. ProRes sounds interesting but I can find no reference to it in the manuals. In my “FCP Additional Easy Setups” folder there are a number of ProRes ones, but I don’t know where to put them or how to use them. Where can I get information, or is it staring me in the face somewhere amongst those thousands of pages?

[Jason Porthouse]

[Ian Brown] “1. Being lazy, in the ten minutes of testing I have done so far, I have simply chosen File>Export>QuickTime Movie before authoring. Will I really get a noticeable improvement if I use Compressor instead ? “

OK, I see what you’re doing now. You can do this – DVDSP has an encoding engine (I think it uses Compressor) and for simple stuff it’s fine. Taking the QT you export in to Compressor, then using one of the presets to make the necessary MPEG-2 files *should* yield better quality, but maybe not noticeably so. You’ll have to run a test.

As to Pro Res – HDV isn’t a great codec for editing. IMO it is a good enough acquisition format, but as soon as you add graphics, effects or any serious colour correction the combination of narrow colourspace and heavy compression quite quickly introduces artifacts. My workflow would be this:

Ingest and cut HDV. When picture locked, make a new sequence. Go to Sequence>Settings. Use the Sequence Preset button to choose Pro Res 1080 50i. I wouldn’t bother with ProResHQ. Then, select all clips in your HDV sequence (lasso tool or apple-A), copy them, switch to your ProRes sequence and paste. Check all clips, graphics etc are correct, render then export. To save space you could uncheck ‘Make Reference Movie self contained’. Use that in DVDSP, or run through Compressor to make the MPEG2 assets for your project.

HTH

Jason

_________________________________

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*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Ian Brown]

Thanks a lot Jason.

That gives me something reasonably concrete to try out and I actually understood the instructions!

Will compare both methods when I next edit.

Thanks again.

Ian.