working with HD material on FCP 5.1.4 (and AF)

[Chris Borjis]

which HD format are you looking at?

Do you have a disk array to support it?

Alot of them are good for 1 or 2 exports without loss of quality .

ProRes and uncompressed go much farther.

[Victor Gonzalez]

most of my HD footage come from a panasonic HVX200 so i am mainly looking at the DVCPRO HD 1080i60 and 1080p24.
we dont work with disk arrays, because we generally dont do any long materials (mostly TV ads).
when using this material, i usually import directly from the MXF file using FCP but some other times i use the P2 driver, they both create a readable file, does this affect HD??

[Trevor Ward]

If you set your timeline sequence to be the same settings as your HD footage, you really will be editing in HD.

As far as AE files, create your composition using the same settings as your final cut pro settings (and the capture settings). Otherwise, the ultimate setting is to use “Lossless” as your compression method in AE. This is basically NO compression. It means it will actually get compressed (rendered) in FCP.

-trevor ward

[Victor Gonzalez]

interesting. so if my capture and sequence are the same i should not have any loss.i originally thought this was only possible in FCP 6.

thnx

[Victor Gonzalez]

also, i forgot. Our director like to play around with the camera settings so sometimes i get mixed footage (1080i60, 1080p30, 720p30 etc) and i need to work with all of it in just one project. what should my settings be? what is the best way to work this kind of material?

[Trevor Ward]

Yeah. You’re good to go. Set your sequence settings to be the same as your capture.

As far as your messed up director, you should yell at him for messing things up. You’ll have to convert to one format or another. I don’t have much experience with mixed HD footage, so I can’t tell you what you should do. But, if it were me…I’d probably use the 720p format. I tend to like the progressive images better than the interlaced.