HDV

[Steve Connor]

This has been covered a lot, IMHO the best way to work with HDV in FCP is to capture HDV native via firewire and then do your edit in an HDV sequence, you’ll find it’s not quite the nightmare it’s made out to be. When you have finshed your edit simply set your render codec to ProRes (if your system can handle it)

This gives you the least amount of conversion and higher quality renders than with HDV.

Some people prefer to ingest in other codecs via HDSDi or a converter box.

Steve Connor
Adrenalin Television

Have you tried “Search Posts”? Enlightenment may be there.

[David Roth weiss]

HDV in FCP has been around for a long time now and there are now new and improved methods for handling HDV. Capturing to Pro Res via firewire is now possible with FCP 6 and it will, in my opinion, quickly become the preferred workflow.

The cameras you mention are both good cameras, however, in my opinion, the new Sony EX puts them both to shame. In side by side comparisons with the EX, the images acquired on the HVX200 are very soft. Once you see those two side by side its very hard to consider spending nearly the same amount of dough on the Panasonic camera.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Chris Babbitt]

David,

If you were bringing in 2-3 hours of footage from the EX using direct file transfer, would you then transcode it all to ProRes before editing, considering the time it would take to do so? Or, would you capture it to ProRes using SDI / Kona, or would you just edit it in native XDCAM?
What do you think would be the best workflow, considering the large amount of footage?

[David Roth weiss]

Chris,

I honestly haven’t gotten that far yet, so I’m not yet one to ask about the EX workflow at this point. However, based on the fact that file transfer from SxS cards is approximately 4X or 5X realtime, I’d probably be inclined to get them onto my computer as fast as possible and then convert them from there if were to convert them. But, let’s hope someone using the workflow presently can give us the real lowdown on the best workflow…

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Steve Connor]

It’s actually closer to 7 to 8 times realtime and same thing applies edit native then render to Prores on the final pass.

Quick and easy!

Steve Connor
Adrenalin Television

Have you tried “Search Posts”? Enlightenment may be there.

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Chris Babbitt] “If you were bringing in 2-3 hours of footage from the EX using direct file transfer, would you then transcode it all to ProRes before editing, considering the time it would take to do so?”

This is obviously one of those things that would depend on the specifics of the project.

If it were the interviews of a documentary, it might pay to transcode them. Or not, depending on other factors.

If it is blue screen or green screen footage, it probably would help to transcode.

And if you can play this footage out of some sort of “deck” to a Kona in real time, then it probably would help in most cases.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[Justin Vaillancourt]

Thanks for all the insight. I’m now aware you can pretty much convert anything to ProRes through Firewire. This helps my decision a lot.

As for the EX, I’ve read it has some huge advantages and disadvantages over the HVX and H1. I think they all have different workflows that can function properly, your choice just depends on the style of shooting you are doing.

Thanks all
Justin