Sony HDV with Canon GL-1

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

[andy blondin] “HDV and capture at 720×480 to match the Canon GL-1”

You at least will be able to capture an SD output from the HDV so you can edit the two cameras’ footage on the same timeline.

But these two cameras will never “match”.

I have a GL1 and its not even a close match to a Sony PD150.

The differences in quality will be very evident.

You’d be much better-off renting a camcorder that better-matches the HDV.

[Ben Insler]

To my knowledge, you’d need an expensive piece of conversion hardware to convert from 1080i HDV to DV on the fly. I’m assuming from your post that you want to edit the HDV and the DV footage together and that you want your final format to be DV, so I’d suggest capturing all HDV footage and then exporting it as DV footage (to prevent rendering time once you’re editing, or you could just edit with your HDV footage in your DV timeline, but you’d always be rendering) unless you want to buy yourself a nice gift for the the holidays from AJA or DeckLink.

To get around that you could capture all the HDV footage and then try to media manage it out and convert the footage as it’s being media managed. This is the way I’d do it if everything always worked the way you thought it would in your head, but I have never done it before and I don’t know if the FCP media manager will scale your HDV footage down from 1920×1080 to 720×480… You’d have to test it. If it doesn’t, read on.

To make life easier on yourself (even though this isn’t necessary, but just to be safe) if you’re going to do this (and I’m also assuming your using FCP), make sure that you set the date/time stamp on your Sony HDV camera before you start shooting and make sure that it is being written to the tape (i think it always is on anything DV related, but just saying it to be sure). This will get recoreded beneath your footage and then into your captured HDV clips. Once you’ve captured all your HDV clips, place them all in one DV timeline (resized and everything) that matches the format you’re shooting on the Canon and export them all as one long DV clip in that format – the time/date stamp will get written to this final DV file you export as well (and thus essentially mark the in and out points of each clip whenever the date/time jumps out of sequence from one clip to another. Once you have exported your HDV clips to DV, import the DV clip into your FCP DV project with your Canon footage, select the newly made HDV->DV clip, and choose Mark->DV Start/Stop Detect. This will place a marker at each break in the time/date stamp, or at each break where you stopped stopped or started recording (it should place one at the start of the clip as well, but if it doesn’t place a marker at the first frame of the clip, add one). Then, create a new bin (maybe called HDV clips), select all the newly created marker in your HDV->DV clip, and drag those markers into your new bin – all the markers will become subclips… each subclip being a captured shot that you exported from HDV. Now, rather than exporting all the clips one at a time from the timeline, you can simply rename the new subclips to keep all your footage orgainzed in shorter clips.

Hope that helps… I really can’t remember if you need to set the date/time… I think DV start/stop is recorded regardless, but I’d rather be safe and be sure it would work. Maybe someone else knows if it’s actually necessary. Anway, hope that helps.

-Ben

[Todd Beabout]

[Ben Insler] “To my knowledge, you’d need an expensive piece of conversion hardware to convert from 1080i HDV to DV on the fly.”

Really? We just used one of those cameras last month and it seems like I remember a built-in down-convert through FireWire even. The reason I know this is because I had a hard time capturing HDV at first. Turns out the camera was still in “DV Downconvert” mode.

So, you should be able to digitize the footage in DV, but as Matte said, don’t expect the footage from the 2 cameras to match well. Also, if you do that be sure to shoot anamorphic 16:9 on the GL-1. That might help a little.

Good luck!

-Todd Beabout
Vazda Studios