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Shot on HDV – Help required
Hi Guys
I’m an amateur Filmmaker and i just shot my short film with SONY Z7 HDV (PAL 1080/50i)on tape. The problem now is that i cannot afford to give my short to an editor and hence i decided to edit it myself on Sony Vegas Pro 9 on a friend’s PC. (Windows Vista/ 2.8 Ghz/ core 2 duo/ 2 GB RAM)
I dont have a capture deck and hence i have to give it to an editing studio to capture it. Most of the editing studios here use FCP/AVID which i cannot use. Therefore i asked them to capture the tape and then convert it to a SONY VEGAS PRO 9 Compatible format so that i can take it in an external HDD and then edit at home.
What format should i take it in so that my quality doesn’t go down drastically??? Please keep in mind the specifications of the PC im working on.
I do not have that much technical knowledge so any help is welcome.
Thanks in advance. Cheers!!!
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11 Replies
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I would think that if you still have the Z7 that you should capture the video yourself. Just attach a firewire (iLink) from the camera to the computer. HDV should capture as an M2T file. Your computer may be borderline for editing this natively but you could use Gearshift or some such and edit proxies OK.
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Thanks for the response.
The camera is actually from a different studio and is presently away on a shoot elsewhere and will be available only after a month. And i cannot wait that long.
But i have a question. Since i shot it on MiniDV tapes can i substitute any other cam jus for the transfer???
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If you have another 1080 50i HDV cam, probably yes. Hows that for a definitive answer?
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Any SONY camera that shoots HDV (PAL 1080/50i)on MiniDV tape should work. It’s sometimes cheaper to rent or buy a camera to capture many tapes, than to pay someone to do it. I know, I’ve been there.
Charlie
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Thanks for the replies guys.
But now, the person who rented me the camera has told me definitely that he cannot give the camera for firewire output as he feels it would spoil the camera. So all i can do now is use his capturing deck (Sony M35) to capture the video and then convert it to a format that would enable me to edit it myself at hoe.
Which format do you guys think will be the best for me on sony vegas without any degradation in quality?
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You shot on an HDV camcorder, the Sony deck can send that same format (*.m2t) back out so capture it into Vegas and start editing.
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From what i have seen here and there on the internet .m2t (transport stream is a very tough one to edit. Am i not right?
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I’ve edited m2t files on a P4 3.4 GHz machine (less power than yours) and had very few issues so you should be OK.
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Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. What about .avi and .mov?
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When you capture an HDV file into Vegas, it automatically comes in as an m2t file so you’d have to transcode it to avi or mov.
avi might be OK to edit but I ‘d stay away from mov.
It can be done but it will put even more stress on your system than an m2t file would.
Try editing the footage in it’s native format first before you try converting to anything else as I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
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