HDV – Starting up HELP with FCP 5.1.4

[David Roth weiss]

Jason,

Start digitizing. Firewire is just fine and cutting as HDV or AIC will be fine as well, especially as your project is for web delivery. Capture the first tape at 1080i60 and see how it looks, certainly no one here knows if it was shot at another frame rate, only you can determine that. Your 2ghz G5 is not perfect, primarily because it should have at least 4gb of RAM, but it will still work just fine — it maybe a little slow when rendering, but notihng that would prevent you from telling the story.

DRW

[Boyd Mccollum]

[harveyhead] “a bag full of HDV tapes. The shooter person has no idea at all about video, so its up to me figure this all out…*gulp…thats okay I think – “

relax. HDV isn’t the end of the world – and the workflow for it is pretty well laid out. Jerry Hofmann has an excellent article in Issue 2 of the Creative Cow Magazine – you can sign up for a free subscription and download it:

https://magazine.creativecow.net/

[harveyhead] “I’ve heard that the HDV-Apple Intermediate Codec looks like garbage “

I’d be more concern with the content ON the tape being garbage…

[David Roth weiss]

[boydmcc] “I’d be more concern with the content ON the tape being garbage…”

Ain’t that the truth…

[Richard Martz]

I happen to own both the HVR-z1U and two of the HDR FX1 cameras. THe workflow I’ve settled into is to shoot everything in 1080i and then downconvert to DV. You can do this because the camera has built in Downconversion capability. Editing HDV is a pain because of the long GOP format. Working in DV will be much smoother as long as your destination format is SD.

Richard Martz
MagicMartz Media

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