[Five Talents]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I can use AE to do that (I have AE 7), but for a simple editing I prefer to stay in PPro as much as possible (I don’t have production bundle/dynamic link so interacting between PPro and AE means rendering.)

I got a tip from a friend to get this working to some degree: creating a sequence to contain only the “masking” track, then applying the multiply/screen effect to this sequence within a master sequence which contains the underlying video. With this way I can see the multiply/screen effect on the master sequence. However, the effect parameters (opacity and cutoff) are essentially useless – any touch on them will disable the effect completely.

Unless someone has a better answer, I think these two effects are somehow broken in PPro 2. I am surprised that I did not see many complaints on this (maybe everyone assumes AE for this type of work and never use these effects in PPro.)

[Five Talents]

I just got into HDV recently and was thinking about using the same workflow to preserve some of the edited HDV home movie to tape (at least until later I can really burn HD or BR DVD.) I would expect this is just like the standard DV workflow since HDV has been established for a long time now. Apparently I have to think again.

HDFlyer,

What do you mean by “Adobe using too low a bit rate”? Isn’t HDV always 25Mbps? I know there is quality difference between different codec, and HDV’s high compression rate will most likey lose some original quality, so the issue may be at the codec engine and the nature of HDV compression instead of bit rate? It would be a big flaw if Adobe does not use 25Mbps to render HDV project when exporting.

Vincent,

If I am just editing HDV in PPro 2 and doing all the color correction/effect/transition without leaving PPro… I would think there is no ‘quality loss’ since all of these operations are done without generating any intermediate HDV generations. It would be a different story if you export your edited result to m2t, and do some post in other program then export back to PPro as m2t again. In this case there would be a loss of quality since two more generations of HDV compression were incurred. Am I right in the understanding above?

I know HDV editing is PPro is not as fast as miniDV, but have found it quite acceptable on my Opteron dual core 2.6GHz, which can handle one stream in real time with about 35-45% CPU usage. I have tried the trial version of Cineform Aspect HD but did not find it to speed up much more (using High quality convert, it’s about twice the size and using about 25-35% when playing one stream in PPro 2.) I actually have some occasional frame delay when playing cineform file, but not on HDV/m2t file. I know this “less compressed” intermediate format is good if you need to exchange files between different applications and want to preserve quality after several video generations… but am not sure if for a home/consumer’s simple editing use is it worth the cost? BTW, what is your approach to archive your project’s HD output if you are not using HDV tape (using large Hard Drive, I guess)?