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HDV – from Final Cut (mac) to AE (win) – optimal settings?
I’ve come up with a way to do this, but it is less than ideal – perhaps someone here could share a better technique?
I am editing a short film in Final Cut in HDV (native).
I need to get some clips to my effects guy, who is using AE7 on a Windows PC.
So far my best bet has been to render the clip outof FCP to “Uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2”. The editing is done in AE, then he exports out a TGA sequence.
This seems to work pretty well except for 2 things: first, there is a slight color shift – the clip coming out of AE is slightly lighter than the original (no color correction has been applied). Second, obviously the uncompressed and TGA sequence take up a LOT more space than the HDV original.
Is there a better way to do this? The windows – mac thing complicates matters a little (there don’t seem to be matching codecs for quicktime on the windows side). I don’t want to lose any quality, but would using the DVCPRO HD codecs help? Would they work in Windows?
Thanks very much for any help – I’m still learning HDV…
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2 Replies
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I don’t work with HDV, but I can tell you a thing or two ’till someone else chimes in:
1. You could render to Quicktime Photo-JPEG if you’re short on disc space.
2. DVCPRO HD is aceptable (being DV100 instead of DV50 or the common DV25), but I seem to recall that the codec isn’t available on Windows.
3. If I recall, you could try working in RGB in FCP. That might help the colour shift. Check the COW to see if there are any useful posts here on that YUV-RGB shift topic.
4. Do you need to render a long clip? If you cut in FCP and get picture lock, you might be able to justify rendering only the portion you need for AE.My 2 cents …
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Thanks for that, Steve.
It seems my issues are all codec-based. Being mostly a mac user (due almost entirely to Final Cut) I wasn’t aware of the “missing” quicktime codecs on Windows. I figured QT7 was QT7 and there’s be HDV and DVCProHD codecs on the windows side of things, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I can get AE on Windows to see my uncompressed 4:2:2 clip from Final Cut, but not HDV, DVCProHD or Apple Intermediate Codec. I also cannot find anywhere in AE (win) to export these same codecs. So far I’ve been rendering from FCP in uncompressed, and having my effects man give me back a TGA sequence. This works pretty well, but the file sizes are quite large (~7GB for 40 seconds at 1080i60) – so far that’s fine since we’ve been dealing with relatively small clips, but it could pose a problem in the near future. I’m also still getting a slight color change when I use this technique (the imported TGA sequence is a bit brighter than the original) but that is easily remedied in FCP.
Thanks for your input so far – I guess HDV is still new enough that it is a bit clunky in cross-platform use. If anyone else has any pointers I’m all ears! Thanks again,
Scott
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