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HDV Monitoring in Premiere Pro
After reading all the excitement about HDV monitoring with FCP, I thought I would chime in with our HDV monitoring solution for Premiere Pro. We utilize source footage acquired on HDV 1080i, and master our finished shows to HDCam tapes.
1. The first thing to do is set up an HDV project for capturing the source footage via firewire. This project can be saved to a slow array, as it just has to keep up with the Cineform intermediary codec. Once all the clips are captured, save this project and close it.
2. Next, create a new Blackmagic HD project on your super-fast RAID array. Import all your captured clips into it and put them all on to the timeline. Start a preview render of the timeline, and go do something else for a few hours. In our experience, this step takes about 7 hours for each hour of footage using a 2.8Ghz Xeon processor. Premiere only eats one of our dual processors while it’s rendering the preview, so the machine is quite useable for other things while this is happening.
3. When the previews are rendered, create a brand new timeline sequence to do your edit on. You can drag your source clips in from the bin, and Premiere is smart enough to use the previews you rendered in step #2 on the first timeline. It even keeps the preview intact if you trim the clip in the new timeline. This gives you an instant, real time HD-SDI output from your Decklink HD card with no further rendering as you edit. We have this output connected to an Apple 23″ LCD panel via a Blackmagic HDLink HD-SDI to DVI converter. It still needs to render any graphics you overlay, but even then it gives you a real time scrub before you render.
For any new footage, go back to the project you created in step #1 to capture, import it into the first timeline and render the preview for the new clip.
4. When the edit is complete, you can output your project without any further rendering over HD-SDI to your HDCam, HD-D5 or whatever deck you have.
5. When you archive your project, you just have to archive the Cineform intermediary files, which are much smaller than the uncompressed preview files. When you dust the project off for revisions, you just re-render the preview files. This really saves on archival storage space. To save even more space, you could also delete the Cineform intermediary files, and recapture from your source tapes when needed.
This workflow is a bit inconvenient, due to the time required to render the previews. It’s really just a stopgap until the Cineform people or someone else can interface with the Decklink HD cards directly.
If you’re mastering back to HDV, try exporting the timeline back to HDV format to output it back to your HDV deck. I haven’t tried this, so I would be interested in hearing about any successes.
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1 Reply
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Great way to get around the limitations. I’m going to try it.
Thanks!
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