HDV in FCP

[Michael Gissing]

We seem to be speaking at cross purposes Shane. I am not saying there isn’t value in using a ProRes sequence with complex timelines. The myth is that you can’t edit HDV or XDCam without first converting to a non GOP codec. As you have discovered, complex timelines with different codecs and frame rates sometimes need to be edited in a ProRes sequence but you are not converting long GOP footage to ProRes first.

I have had no reports of FCP crashing or giving grief like you have had in the least twenty+ HDV docos that I have graded and onlined. Some of them had complex layering and opacity/ blend modes and heaps of text but not any with different frame rates. (ah the joys of 25fps world)

[Shane Ross]

Ah, yes. Sorry. Simple HDV/XDCAM projects, or projects that ONLY contain that format, those are pretty straightforward and easy.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Rich Kaelin]

Thanks to all for this great feedback. Yes, my project did start to crash a lot toward the end of this project, but as I said earlier, hundreds of hours of footage, over 12,000 separate clips and in the neighborhood of 3,000 plus cuts on the sequence, took me a few days to do :). I was not mixing any formats, but I did find that rendering in prores eliminated some actual errors. I had a couple of transitions that worked in prores, but crashed otherwise. When sticking to HDV I did not see any quality difference , I actually exported a clip to prores and layered it on the original, so the effect would be a cut back to original in the middle of a clip, and scrutinized it diligently, could not see a difference from one frame to the next. But it seems obvious that Apple plays better with prores, and converting all footage to prores for multiformat editing is the best way to go when possible.
And as for crashing, I have another thread going on that, as I thought it was unrelated. One interesting response came back with system maintenance…I was unaware this was need on the Mac (I am relatively new to Mac, so all the crashing made me fell nostalgic about Windows, Mac NEVER crashed until this project) Do any of you run maintenance programs to clean up the lists? Just curios…and if so , what? As this was a huge project with no mixed footage, seems like a plausible theory as to why I was having the problem.
Final note, for the person with color issues, would editing the HDV footage in a 1920×1080 Prores timeline help that situation?, as opposed to the 1440 timeline he said he was using…it seems to work fine when I tested, and renders look great, should go out to color fine, or am I missing something? Like I said still new to FCP world, and not much experience with color yet. If anyone nows a really quick, concise color tutorial, that would be great, too. Thanks all.

Rich Kaelin
Kaelin Motion Production Services
New York

[Jeff Mueller]

Michael:

God I hope you’re right. I still have sync problems with Color 1.5.2 but maybe there were other weird things in the mix. I have a huge (for me) project I’m finishing now. 20 hours raw edited to 2 hours, shot HDV 24P, some complex graphics but mostly done in AE so they’re already ProRes composites, transferred (FW) directly to ProRes 4:22 (but 1440×1080 ’cause that’s how FCP does it) and edited in a matching timeline. I can not afford for this to come back out of sync. Any tips? Delivery is SD DVD.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA