Working in HDV

[Chris Poisson]

Barbara,

There are hundreds of posts on this topic here, but in a nutshell, capture native HDV via Firewire or capture to ProRes if you have FCP 6.1 or higher. If you do the former you can avoid conforming by working in an 8 bit or ProRes timeline and rendering.

But, you should do a search, there is so much on this I don’t do it justice here. There’s also an HDV forum here.

Have a wonderful day.

[Jerry Hofmann]

There’s no way I know of to save the TC when using the AIC… it’s not the best way to speed up HDV editing anyway because it looses picture quality. If you have an intel Mac though, capturing to ProRes will speed things up a lot. This at the cost of disk space though… the files will be larger.

An intermediate way of working with HDV is to capture it natively (the only way to capture it with G5’s via firewire) then set your sequence settings to HDV but render to ProRes. The setting is found in the sequence settings’ video processing tab. This will speed up rendering by about 40%, but still not as fast as capturing to prores in the first place.

Jerry

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[Rafael Amador]

Hi jerry,
Just for curiosity; Have you tried editing native EX-1? It offers better or worst RT performance than HDV?
Thanks,
Rafael

Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
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..and always a big mess on top of the table.

[Barbara Ballow]

If you were faced with 70 hours which had been captured using the Apple Intermediate Codec, would you make the best of it or would you re-capture to native HDV? I can re-capture, but I am trying to balance potential mine fields here.

[David Roth weiss]

[Barbara Ballow] “If you were faced with 70 hours which had been captured using the Apple Intermediate Codec, would you make the best of it or would you re-capture to native HDV? I can re-capture, but I am trying to balance potential mine fields here.”

Barbara,

After nearly three decades of managing post I can tell you that only way to answer such a question legitimately is to know more about the nature of the project. Give me some details and I’ll help you to make the right decision, which might well be painful in the short run…

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
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Los Angeles

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[Chris Poisson]

Barbara,

Ouch! 70 hours? If you are happy with the look of the AIC stuff, you could go through your source clips and just make sure your naming scheme is bulletproof, which in the absence of reel numbers and TC is the only way I know to manage this.

Add numbers or somehow change the names so that you can keep track of everything.

Have a wonderful day.

[Barbara Ballow]

Thanks, David.

This is an 60:00 to 75:00 doc, destined for PBS and BBC. There will be few effects. The plan was to output an un-color corrected, textless master from the box, take the show into an HD DaVinci suite and then on to titling and packaging. Audio
would be exported for the mixer.
I normally do a video conform – old-fashioned, I know, but since this is going in at full rez, there seems to be no point.

[David Roth weiss]

Barbara,

There are essentially two ways of dealing with such a conundrum, there’s the best case scenario and then all others. This one may unfortunatley have to be all others…

As Chris points out, the fact that you’ve got 70-hours of material digitized is a killer and may pretty much be the deciding factor on this one, but will be working in a compromized position from square one, and with no failsafe and no alternatives once you embark on what is essentially “a river of no return.”

The key to your own sanity when no timecode info is availble is to be absolutely certain to backup your all of your AIC QTs to one or more firewire drives, which you should store in a secure spot. Otherwise, you could find yourself, at best, having to eyeball match your entire cut.

Unfortunately AIC has already thrown out some of your color information, making for a less than ideal situation for tape
to tape CC on DaVinci, but there are worse things in heaven and Earth, such as CCing DV on DaVinci, which still manages to get done beautifully all the time.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Barbara Ballow]

I have decided to redigitize all the source tapes in native HDV. I need to watch the material at sound speed anyway. I am keeping all the original media for now.
Thanks for everyone’s advice. Barbara

[Shane Ross]

Well, one big problem is that of all the networks out there, PBS and BBC are HUGE sticklers for quality and accurate timecoded source footage. PBS if I recall actually requires the project file along with the source tapes. So you might be stuck having to recapture everything again.

And the Assistant may have to make amends for doing this wrong in the first place.

Do you have a horrid deadline? Because if I were in this boat, I’d recapture. Around the clock…the assistant at night, me during the day. Get in done in 3-4 days.

Shane

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