HD-SD: There and back again.

[David Grantham]

I wonder if most canons have the same downconversion quality. Economy favours renting an HV40 or HV20 for capturing.

(And Ann’s right about my machine, thx – as mentioned previously, it can’t play HDV with TLC without big hiccups so unless CS4 offers some incredible efficiencies over merely playing, I can’t see how I could edit in HD. But I’ll be installing it today or tomorrw so that’s a simple test.)

[Ninetto Makavejev]

OP has a P4, not quite the same.
Dan’s methode is meant for getting a HDV timeline to SD dvd.
Downconverting in the camera will give you good quality footage.
I have the same camera.

Pentium P4: some even have 4 cores and fit into 775 Boards, so it depends on the model + motherboard.

Dan’s hd2sd method can render out to any codec, not just DVD-mpeg2.

[Ann Bens]

Why on earth rent a HV40 if you got an A1?

———————————————–
Adobe Certified Expert Premiere Pro

[David Grantham]

I don’t own either, but the HVs are $100 less per day to rent.

[David Grantham]

My research so far indicates that the HVs shoot 24p only in 2:3 pulldown to 29.97 fps. My material is 24F HDV. Web-sleuthing suggests that HVs can output HDV shot in 24F as 24F. I can’t however find any indication of whether an HV will down-convert this 24F HDV to 24F SD. Posted a query on the Canon forum, but so far a web-search unearths nothing.

[David Grantham]

Thanks to all for the input so far; looks like the final piece of research I’ll need is to choose an application to create good 24F SD from good 60i 24p SD.(Canon tech tells me all their downconverting cameras – XHA1 included – are limited to that output.)

I’m going to need such an app to create an SD project I can template to an HD 24F project.

Recommendations for pulldown-removal appreciated: AVIsynth? Or something with a friendlier GUI? Cineform? I’ve searched “pull-down removal” and clearly AE (I don’t have it) will, and maybe “interpret footage” in recent versions of Ppro. Aparrently something called “DVfilmmaker.”

(I look forward to the HD-capable editing system and solid state camera on my horizon.)

[David Grantham]

In case anyone looks to the conclusion of this post, according to PPro tech support, PPro will interpret both true 24p (I’ve been erroneously calling that 24F) and 24p-as-60i-with-3:2-pulldown the same way (and compatibly) on the same 24p project.

They also said that the way to work with an SD version and create from it an HD version of a project is to import all the SD clips into an HD project and scale them up, and then export/down-res to SD for an SD version (this upresing and down-resing will of course reduce image quality) and reroute the clip links to the HD footage to export an HD version. The resulting HD version could also be to an SD version (I expect this would be better as it would only be scaled in one direction.)

Another way may be to export an EDL between two projects, but there’s no way to copy effects between projects, so they’d have to be re-built.