HDCAM Capture Help

[Shane Ross]

There is a LOT to cover here.

How much footage?
What drives do you have to capture this to? Are they fast enough to capture the footage onto?
What format do you need to deliver? This determines HOW you will capture the footage. Offline at DVCPRO HD and capture at higher resolution later? Or capture at 8-bit or 10-bit uncompressed now? Or ProRes? Will your client accept ProRes? Will green screen be involved?

Knowing all of this is very important…because an entire workflow revolves around it.

Shane

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Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[James Whittington]

Sorry, I guess I’m not familiar enough to even know what info to provide! 🙂

I’m working on a Power Mac G5 with 4×2.5 GHz processor and 4.5 GB DDR2 SDRAM. So it should be good. Final output will be for broadcast to Beta SP…4:3 and standard def. So I’m not sure why they’re even shooting HDCAM to begin with. So I guess I’ll have to capture natively at 16:9 and will lose some picture on both sides (they are aware of this). We are renting a deck to upload all the footage (it won’t be that much footage…less than an hour I think).

Thanks for the help. Wish I had a way to practice this, but I’m just gonna get the deck and footage next Wednesday morning and away I go!

[Michael Gissing]

The important info here is your drive speed and capacity. Unless you have a RAID and at least 1.5 TB of storage free then editing an hours worth of rushes plus renders in Uncompressed HD is going to require this sort of hard drive.

Given your final output, my suggestion is to capture directly from the HDCam as standard def uncompressed, but again, only if you hard drives are capable of the SD data rate. Either do the down convert with your card or the SD SDI outputs from the HDCams are also excellent down converters.