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HDV 24p / FCP Workflow – Go in Native then Render Pro Res or what? Help!
Hello everyone,
I’ve recently read Tim Wilson’s article on Apple Pro Res & HDV and did some digging around elsewhere as well about this topic but I’m still unsure of the exact route to take post workflow wise given the specificity of my project’s requirements. Any help and suggestions would be much appreciated.
A disclaimer before I go on is that we have high hopes for the project but limited resources and are trying to do everything as economically as possible yet trying to preserve and maximize quality as much as possible.
The project in question is a feature documentary that will mostly be shot with the Sony HDV V1U camera using the 24p mode (which I know is not true 24p). The reasons why we are shooting this project on this format are manifold: (a) we like the look of it from previous projects and tests that we have shot with it (b) both the director and I have V1U cameras (c) we work with very small crews (sometimes just 2 people), in sometimes remote locations, following fast action, where downloading footage on cards to a computer is a hassle that we want to avoid. We like to pack light and shooting an HDV signal onto cheap DV tapes is fine with us for now.
So now, the post production for this doc project is actually a bit more complex that other projects that we have done with these cameras before. The final film will incorporate DV images also shot by us, photo scans, archival clips from a myriad of formats, as well as film footage which we shot on super8 and 16mm and possibly even 35mm (which we will have to transfer to some type of high end format of video and then bring into FCP at some point).
For budgetary reasons, we want to do all of the editing ourselves, in our own machines (a MacBook Pro 2.66 Ghz Intel Core Duo laptop and a Mac Pro 4 Core 2.66 Ghz tower). We we want to avoid having to rent expensive decks or buying capture cards, or investing too much on storage (we have a few firewire 400 & 800 external drives at this time which we plan on using to hold and back up our footage) at this early stage of the post process and would love to be able to capture the footage via firewire as we have been doing in the past and do the offline edit ourselves in our machines. The plan now is to then cut the project entirely with what we have, which is the two computers mentioned, FCP Studio 2 (with FCP 6.0.3) and the HDV cameras (which will serve as our decks also – we know it’s not recommended, but it’s what we have). But we also want to keep the future in mind. What does that mean? We want to offline the project in such a way that we will be able to do it without investing too much money on our set up right now, and in such a way that we will have the least amount of problems with our set up during the editing process, but also in such a way that we will be able to prep it well for an online eventually in which we would go to a post house for color correction and to bring the project to the highest quality it can be for our 1080i tape masters.
We have heard and read about the possibility of capturing the HDV footage as ProRes and working on a ProRes sequence. My fear about that is that 80-100 hours of ProRes footage (which is probably how much we will shoot in the end, we have shot 20 hours so far) may be too heavy for our drives and computers and may slow us down during the edit and give us problems… I also heard that to capture ProRes properly one needs a capture card, which we don’t have. And beyond that, when I tried to capture HDV as ProRes via firewire on my MacBook Pro, I seem to have been able to do it but the timecode information on the digitized clips wasn’t transferred from tape which is a problem for us given the offline/online workflow system that we are setting up…
So, we are thinking about digitizing the HDV tapes as native HDV because of its smaller fie size, importing the other material (film, DV material, archival stuff, photos, etc) into the project and cutting everything into an HDV 1080i60 sequence which is what we have done before. From there, we would cut the film and once done, we would take it to a post house and online the final cut to a higher format sequence (like Apple ProRes or something else) from which we would output out 1080i tape masters.
We know that there may be problems with rendering times while working on HDV sequences and we also know that we will need to wait a while for the outputs as FCP “processes” the sequence before letting us output. Do you predict any problems beyond these two that we would have to deal with if we indeed chose to go with this workflow set up? Do you recommend an alternative route that may save us headaches and still work within out configuration? Any suggestions and opinions about this would be immensely appreciated. We would love to hear your expert opinions about our workflow plan.
Thank you so much in advance for reading this long post.
Thiago Da Costa
Figura Media (Media with a Conscience)
http://www.figuramedia.com -
7 Replies
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You can capture HDV native (and DV) and edit on a ProRes sequence. That’s probably your best bet.
Sean
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Thanks for the response Sean. I will test that out. I’m afraid that going that route will mean that I have to render all native HDV clips brought into the ProRes sequence, which would be an unwieldy way to deal with this project as it will be very long. But I will test it out to see.
Question 1: going this route would make all non-HDV clips (like motion grfx) look better than they would on an HDV sequence, correct?
Question 2: if I were to go this route, would it save time when it comes time to output a sequence? With HDV sequences there’s always that big wait for “video processing”. Would working on a ProRes sequence bypass that processing stage?
Thanks again for getting through my very long post.
Thiago
http://www.figuramedia.com -
I didn’t carefully read your fist post, I just skimmed through it.
So your final output is to go back to HDV? In that case forget what I said about ProRes. You need to edit in an HDV sequence. Any other workflow is pointless because all the footage will have to be processed and encoded to HDV regardless.
Sean
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Hi Sean-
Actually, I don’t want to output to HDV. I want to output eventually to a high res 1080i tape format. My question is how to set up the project before getting to the online. What I want to do first is to do an offline on the cheap in the quickest and least render intensive way possible taking into account that 60-70% of my footage will be HDV but that some of the footage will be coming to me from other formats as well (yet to be determined). I have been advised that shooting in HDV will force me to “leave HDV behind” at some point during post because HDV is more intended as an acquisition format than an output/master format. My question is when to leave it behind then given our set up. Do we cut evertyhing on HDV sequences since most of our footage is HDV and then upres during the online? This would be great for us as we wouldn’t need any capture cards or decks that we don’t already have. I’m just wondering if there’s a counter indication to doing an offline on HDV sequences and projects with the intent of doing an online using a higher quality format for our sequences and clips (like ProRes).
Thanks and all the best,
Thiago
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You can edit on an HDV sequence, go into sequence settings and set it to render effects-only as ProRes (this is a new feature with FCP6). That’s probably the best option.
Sean
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Thank you Sean.
I will give it a try.
All the best,
Thiago
Thiago Da Costa
Figura Media / Media with a Conscience
http://www.figuramedia.com -
Hi Thiago. Did you work out your post pipeline. i am in a similar situation with a doc actually. most footage is coming in from Sony V1U as HDV shot at 24p (not 24p A where the pull down can be removed). I will also be incorporating a ton of different formats.
In my research, it seems like editing HDV material in a 60i Pro Res sequence is the best bet. Did you test this? Can ProRes take the HDV clips without rendering?
Please let me know any advice you could share. Thanks!
Best,
Eric Lin
NYC
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