HDV slow rendering

[Jerry Hofmann]

I’m not working much with HDV, but it doesn’t much surprise me that it’s slowish… I suspect that if you used the intermediate codec instead of HDV “native” codec, things would improve…

Reason “native” HDV is slow is because it’s not an I frame codec, meaning it’s calculating some of the frames: the ones that are only recording the difference between true I frames. Where the intermediate codec is ALL I frames, much like DV or uncompressed video is… less to calculate… Theory states that there would be a signal loss doing this (compressing to the intermediate codec) but I have a feeling that if you try it, you might not actually see a lot of difference. Dunno, again not really using HDV much.

Jerry

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[Steve Connor]

Plus the fact it’s HD of course, more pixels more calculations needed – slower renders.

When you say slow – exactly how slow do you mean, say compared with DV?

Steve Connor
Cardinal HD

[Dave Yakir]

well for about 1 and a half minutes, it takes about 8 min of rendering time…

I have not worked with the system yet, but will be working on it in a week and they called me with this issue… also, before doubling the memory (was 2 gigs) FCP 5 would crash frequently. The people I’m working with captured the footage through iMovie and used the QT’s created to work with FCP. Is there any sort of issues with doing this, or is it a safe way to capture? Personally I use FCP to capture everything but they did it this way and it ran into the crashing problem (but when the mem was doubled to 4 gigs, the crashing problem went away).

Any suggestions/techniques you suggest to make the editing process as smooth as possible? There is a lot of dailies to be captured and I dont really have the time to run into major problems.

Any help would be great!

Thanks,
Dave