Rendering HDV

[Steve Roberts]

I may be talking out of turn here, but why do you want to render to HDV?

HDV is a compromise format, best for acquisition, not editing, compositing or recompression. You should get the footage out of HDV as soon as possible.

Where is the footage going?

If it’s being sent to another application to be processed, you should render to a high-quality codec such as Animation, or Photo-JPEG if you don’t have much storage space.
If it’s going to DVD, you should render to MPEG-2, or to a high-quality codec to be imported into a dedicated compressor such as Squeeze or Compressor.

So why do you want to render to HDV?

[Amit Zinman]

I am rendering to another application. Have you tried using Animation with HDV material (Sony HDV 1080i PAL)?

[Steve Roberts]

No, not yet, but it’s my understanding that the material should be converted to something other than HDV as soon as possible in the workflow, if you’re doing any rendering (recompression). Recompressed material with interframe compression (like HDV) just degrades much faster.

In my opinion, any advantage of editing HDV (natively) disappears when you bring in HDV material that has been recompressed to HDV in AE. Now if the AE material is brand new (not from HDV), and you’re just compressing it to HDV for editing, then maybe you can still edit natively in HDV with no loss. However, my research has found that once you get into recompression, you should get out of HDV.

Of course, there’s a trade-off. Regular HD takes up more disc space, and you may not be able to edit it efficiently.

Now to answer your question: in AE 7, I found HDV after choosing the Quicktime movie Format, then hitting the Format Options button and choosing an HDV codec there.

Anybody else?