HDV confusion, please help

[David Battistella]

have a read throught this.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=8&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/battistella_david/recapturing_HDV/index.html

David

Peace and Love 🙂

[Annaël Beauchemin]

[Michael Black] ” I have deck control, but when I try to capture, it goes to the spot, starts playing, but then doesn’t digitize and says, “Unable to lock deck servo. Tape possibly still threading.””

It takes a whole 5 seconds for the miranda box to give clean signal. You might want to increase preroll to 7 or even 8 (yikes) seconds in FCP. HDV really is a pain to online…

[Mactrix]

The problem is that this Sony VTR has really bad analogue
outputs. We just tested to capture over the component
outputs using a Decklink Multibridge in uncompressed
and it looks even worse than the nativ HDV.

The Mirranda converts IEEE1394 HDV to HD-SDI? This
should be better than but in my opinion you won’t gain
much. Maybe the Mirranda makes a nice 4:2:0 to 4:2:2
chroma-upsampling but I would follow Graemes suggestion
to convert in FCP …

[Steve Connor]

Why recapture? it never enters our workflow for offline/online

Capture material from firewire in HDV, edit in HDV, drop finished HDV sequence into 8 or 10 bit timeline and render. Quality wise there is NO difference between this and recapturing all the material in 8 or 10 bit. I know because we’ve tested it extensively.

HDV editing is much simpler than you think!

Steve Connor
Adrenalin Television

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

[Graeme Nattress]

FCP seems to also do 4:2:0 to 4:2:2 itself, say, when you make an uncompressed movie from an HDV one. Quicktime player does not.

What I see the Miranda box for is for when you can’t edit native, not for when you can. Also, I thought they were going to allow SDI input and turn that into HDV to go to tape, which would actually be useful, but they don’t. That makes it a really lame product IMHO.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[David Battistella]

Steve,

This is exactly my conclusion. The article I wrote was considering some situations when your media may have been knocked offline etc.

As Luke Maslin of BMD added in an addendum to the article, your workflow was the one that you should use when working with HDV.

David

Peace and Love 🙂

[Jay Curlee]

This thread is very helpful in understanding an HDV workflow. I have asked this in other ways in other forums but I have upgraded some of my gear and now offer this:

I have a music documentary feature with music performances shot with 4-Z1-U’s and 1 Sony 900 HDCAM.

I have a nice array from MacGurus; 3.7 TB Port Multiplier Raid 0 with 10 drives. I have a Quad dual G5, 4.5 G RAM, Kona LHe, FCP 5.0.4. I have the little Sony HDV deck M10-U. No HDCAM or DVCProHD Deck or Digibeta deck.

I need the best and most economical way to get the selected HDCAM footage, about 90 minutes of music, spread across 20 tapes, into my project. I will borrow/rent a HDCAM deck. My DP transferred the HDCAM to HDV by shooting a HD monitor with his Z1-U. We have window timecode for reference. We have rough cutted all the multicam music pieces using the wonderful multiclip function in FCP.

My deliverables in order are:
June 3: Roughcut for screening by focus group on HDV. Big screen in movie theater via nice video projector and my HDV deck. I have seen the footage on this screen and it looks great. I can live with the window timecode HDCAM/HDV for this.
July 15: SD DVD for film fest submission
Aug 15: Digibeta for film fest screening
Date unknwn: HDCAM master for possible transfer to film.

At some point I am going to have to pick an I-frame codec. I believe the SATA Raid and my Quad is up to the task. The July 15 deadline is the important one.

TIA, Jay

[Mark Maness]

Hey gang… It seems like everybody is making this HDV thing a little too difficult. Yes, I know its a bastard format that FCP has real trouble working with but if you do purchase the converter box, the whole process becomes a whole lot easier.

I was just like you guys… pulling my hair out wishing for a better alternative to the HDV crap – not the video but the way FCP handles it. Sony HDV has some really awesome video quality and I am really impressed how it looks – for the money, that is. Finally, I convinced my boss we needed something to bridge the gap. I purchased an AJA HD10A so that I can convert my analog component video to a useable format that I can convert into any codec for easier editing. I then use my firewire as machine control and get my audio thru the firewire. And now, all of my problems are gone.

By the way, I am using the AJA Kona 2 as my capture card and downconverted HDV to SD video is awesome looking.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Michael Black]

Thanks for your help. It was hard telling the guys that hired me that I didn’t have any work to do.

[Michael Black]

Wow, who would have thought this thread would have gotten so big?

So I told the director that he was editing natively the whole time (he’s fairly new to FCP and HDV and general codecs 101). Looks like we’re going to keep working in the format he’s been working in and anything that’s being sent to the FX house I’ll just export as a quicktime in 8bit (or maybe 10bit?) which we’ll then drop into the uprezzed sequence when we’re getting ready to deliver.

Again, the hardest part was explaining to the director that most of the work he hired me for was, well, already done.

Thanks to everyone for your help.