HDV to SD digi-beta

[Jeremy Garchow]

Do you have a capture card?

[Michael Gissing]

The HDV timeline can be copied into an SD uncompressed 10 bit timeline and rendered, or made as a Quicktime self contained SD uncompressed 10 bit. You can also use Compressor to make the same file. Avoid DVCPro as it is unnecessary transcoding and compressed.

Both HDV & SD uncompresed are upper field dominant. Don’t deinterlace.

If you have a Decklink card, the hardware downconvert is not good enough. I am told reliably that Kona cards do an excellent hardware downconvert so you can go straight from the HDV timeline to SD digi beta.

[Ceri Allen]

Hi Michael, thanks for replying

Yes there is a black magic card so I can play out HD but I was told it would be quicker to render a DVCPro timeline rather than a HD one.Also I am exporting to quicktime movie after the digi-beta tapes have been made so again i though exporting from a DVCPro timeline would be quicker.

I used de-interlace as final cut added a shift field filter to every shot in the HD timeline and when I played out into a TV this made the image flicker. Rather than going through and deleting the filter from every shot I used deinterlace as a quicker way as it seemed to solve the flickers. However it seemed to take ages to render. Is there a better way to do this?

I wanted to avoid making a quicktime movie as once it has been watched on a television monitor there are small changes that may need to be made.

Overall I guess there are two ways I should of done this (both better than the method I have used !):

Nest my edited sequence from the HDV1080i50 timeline into a Uncompressed 10-bit PAL 48KHz (taken the time to remove the shift field filters and not applied a de-interlace)?

Or simply rendered my HDV1080501 sequence (again making sure to remove the shift fields)and used the black magic card to down convert it to SD as it plays out?

Which would be best and the quickest method in terms of render time?

Sorry for all the questions, I am up against a deadline and still trying to learn about different codecs!!

[Xiaolom]

put your (edited) HDV timeline into an uncompressed SD (8 or 10 bit) timeline, render, play out to digi-beta.

DVCPro as intermediate for a digi-beta master from HDV project is a really bad idea because the field dominance is swapped twice in this process !
…and this really makes you render stuff unnessecary!

[Ceri Allen]

Thanks for the reply.

Just another question. I used deinterlace to overcome the probem of the image flickering when played out to a moniter (though it was from a DVCPro timeline). Some of the flickering seemed to be because final cut had automatically added a shift fields filter but others just flickered anyway. Is there anyway to overcome this other than removing the shift fields shot by shot?

Also I now have rendered de-interlaced DVCPRo timelines which look fine when they play out to a moniter (even the slow-mo doesn’t actually look too bad as most are over 50%). I now realise I went about it in the wrong way but rather than creating new timelines and re-rendering is there any other reason that DVCOPro should not be used to lay off to digi-beta?

[Xiaolom]

[Ceri Allen] “Just another question. I used deinterlace to overcome the probem of the image flickering when played out to a moniter (though it was from a DVCPro timeline). Some of the flickering seemed to be because final cut had automatically added a shift fields filter but others just flickered anyway. Is there anyway to overcome this other than removing the shift fields shot by shot?
“

It sounds like you captured the footage with a wrong setting or your timeline settings don

[Nick Price]

Hi Ceri,
FCp only adds the shift fields filter when you add clips into a timeline. If you instead, duplicate your timeline, press Apple-0 and change the seetings to Uncompressed, you find the shift fields filter hasnt been added, and you can render away.

By the way I partially de-interlace most of my footage, as it removes the harsh movement of video, and, (as some people say) makes it look more filmic. However i have noticed that when slo-moing and adding the deintlace filter, and then uprezzing to uncompressed the slomo footage stutters. As far as i can make out it’s just one to many operations for the render manager. So i mixdown the slomo in the offline as a quicktime movie, then import that into my upressed sequence, add deinterlace and online filters and its some as you like.

cheers
nick