-
Issues recording HDV on a Sony HVR-M25E
Hi,
We’re working on Final Cut Pro 6 and have digitised HDV footage from a Sony HVR-M25E shot on a Sony HVR-V1E. Digitising and working with the footage posed no problems using the easy setup for HDV 1080i 50.
However, recording back to HDV is proving difficult. Recording to the deck on DV or DVCAM settings works fine, right aspect ratio etc. but not for HDV. The playback options for HDV on FCP are greyed out and the deck doesn’t show an image on the monitor in the right aspect ratio when in HDV modes.
I would be interested to hear if anyone else has experienced any issues like this and what settings on FCP and the deck were used to overcome the problem.
Thanks
-
4 Replies
-
I understand your frustration… It seems there is some issues with the Sony HVR HDV decks and FCP at the moment. I’m not able to write to an HVR-M15U deck in DV in FCP 6.0.5 (or 6.0.3, 6.0.4).
The only solution I found was to use Adobe Premier Pro CS3. We have the Production bundle installed on all of our systems and Premier seems to work fine for just this sort of thing. I’m not well versed in Premier but I have become well-acquainted with it lately.
Let me ask you this…. Is the deck set in the NTSC mode or PAL mode (60i or 50i)? Have you tried to re-initialize your deck back to factory specs? Give that a shot.
_______________________________
Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com -
Lindsay,
Sure, you should be able to record out to HDV, after all, you paid for that capability. However, there are good reasons why most professional users would never do it and would instead opt to record to another HD format, such as DVCPro or HDCam if a tape copy is required.
The primary issues are: 1) going back to HDV tape requires a lengthy conform process; and, 2) the conform process is an additional compression step that can have a significant impact on text and graphics in your edited piece. The video can handle the compression, but text and graphics can take a pretty big hit.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
-
Hi Guys,
Many thanks for responding to my post. We work with other HD formats HDCAM and XDCAM and workflow is fine as we’re usually delivering as HD Quicktime files these days with more and more distribution on the web and DVD, Blu-Ray etc. However some clients just don’t have the budget for full HD and for web delivery, sometimes HDV is just fine for these purposes.
As it happens I looked through a few other posts as I was convinced i was missing something somewhere and found a solution.
Basically another post said that you can only record to the deck via Print to Video mode after the timeline is conformed. The long and the short of it is, I set all the settings on the deck to HDV, turned it off, closed down FCP, rebooted the deck, rebooted FCP and went straight to ‘print to video’ with the record automatically ticked – hey presto it worked fine with correct aspect ratios and HDV lights on the front of the deck. Hurrah.
Long winded post I know, but thought others might be interested in the solution. Once again, many thanks for your input.
Lindsay
-
Lindsay is absolutely right. You will get no indication that the deck is being fed signal at all. After Final Cut goes away and “Conforms” the track, you are presented with the standard print to tape screen. Hit the button and off it goes. Squirrel-ly but it works.
I don’t know if this peculiar thing is resolved in FCP 7 or not.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up