I personally would capture HDV as DVCPRO HD, and I have. To do this you need a capture card. Yes, you will lose a few lines of horizontal resolution (180 lines…1440 to 1280), but it is MUCH easier to work with…fast render times.

But, I don’t work with HDV much…

Firstly, I have been following your blog for a while now, and would like to thank you and fellow posters for some great tips and info.

Concerning this workflow. I’m definitely too much of a scaredy cat to risk losing batch capture possibilities, and like you, would get very irritated by having thousands of clips automatically created. So it seems that the ‘render to prores’ option is the strongest. This retains the ability to recapture in a disaster, and helps rendering times while editing. However, my problem is that I’m often exporting WIP edits as quicktimes to be reviewed on the web, or DVD’s for offline approval etc. When it comes to exporting these formats I get some seriously long export times due, I think, to still having HDV footage in the timeline. Do you have any suggestions for avoiding these painful exports? Or would you suggest the conversion of all rushes to Prores, thus ensuring matching TC with the original footage, and faster editing, rendering AND export times? I may be answering my own question as I write this but I would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks

Joe

No difference.

Matt Jeppsen
FreshDV

Because I didn’t want to deal with the long render times associated with HDV. I know that I would be rendering it as ProRes, but still, would not that transcode require a longer render? I guess I should test that sometime and see what times I get. I just really like the RT I get with DVCPRO HD.

“Or put it on a ProResHQ timeline so everything that requires it would render to that?”

I didn’t want to render all the time. Unless you mean at the end when I am all done. Yeah, I could have done that. Nice thing about FCP, so many plausible workflows to choose from.

“If I recall correctly, 1080p24 HDV would play back in real time on my dual 2.0 GHz G5″

Oh, totally. It’s so highly compressed, you could play it back without problems. And depending on the RAID you have, you might get more than one stream.

“Source footage if untouched is still pristine source, not re-rendered, and anything that needs rendering gets rendered to a better codec – win/win, right?”

True….true. Leave it to you to point out great solutions and great workflows. I might have to go this route next time.

If I recall correctly, 1080p24 HDV would play back in real time on my dual 2.0 GHz G5. If you’re rendering to that codec, one stream is all you play back, and if your box can play back HDV, you should be good to go…right?

It would be faster (no transcode), have reels, allow log and capture, and be more efficient with your disk space utilization. Source footage if untouched is still pristine source, not re-rendered, and anything that needs rendering gets rendered to a better codec – win/win, right?

-mike of hdforindies.com

So, yes, I’d be leery of a system that does not allow you to Batch Capture. If you find a way around this problem, however, that would be cool!

~Luke

Shane, you can toggle this off for HDV tape captures in the log/capture window under the Clip Settings tab. It’s nice to have the option to do it either way.

As to ProRes for the sequence render codec, I’ve been pretty happy with that option for most projects.

Matt Jeppsen
FreshDV

I should probably read a little more carefully before posting late at night… since you’re going to DVD, then yes.. DVCPro HD should be plenty adequate.

Good luck with the project, Shane – let us know how it goes!

-Christian Glawe

1) Getting a MacPro and Kona 3 or LHe and capturing as ProRes via the card.

2) Capturing Native HDV and then setting my sequence render settings to ProRes. Possibly. I’ll test this. But what I don’t like about this is, again, the tape is broken up on every start and stop of the camera. I HATE that…That is one of the drawbacks of P2 that I hate. This makes scanning thru footage very tedious.

But seriously, having captures as DVCPRO HD and comparing that to the ProRes, I am not seeing much difference. And I am playing this back not only on my HD CRT, but component to my Panasonic 42″ Plasma…just to check. But I am sure when it comes time to color correct that I’ll see the hit. But, when I get to that point, I’ll make the render settings ProRes. The DCVPRO HD codec is very nice, it only has issues when rendering out 8-bit. So I’ll wager rendering as ProRes will be fine.

But, this is all a good test. As this isn’t intended for High End HD delivery, but for DVD only.

What about the Capture as Native HDV Method, and then using Compressor to convert the clips to ProRes?

Yes, I realize this is a pretty long transcode to send to Compressor (it would require a test to see just how much time you’re talking about), but I would imagine for a project of this nature, you may have the luxury of doing the transcode overnight?

This way, you get your full Log and Capture experience, transcode overnight, and then dupe your project and relink to the new ProRes material. Also, you have a ready made backup with your HDV materials (could move ‘em to your backup volume at your convenience).

I just don’t see how suffering a rez hit (going to DVCPro HD) is the true way to go…

… or maybe I’m missing something (?)….

-Christian Glawe

When you set up everything the way the article shows, when you hit Apple-8, you are only given the option to type in a name. Look at the article, it shows you a picture of it. HDV CAPTURE…and a place for a name only. I typed in the tape name “EK-A01″ and then had a slew of clips that were EK-A01, EK-A01-2, EK-A01-3 and so on. Delete those clips from the browser, rename them on the finder level, then reimport the clips into FCP. But yeah, only option is clip name.

I am going back and logging and capturing a tape as DVCPRO HD 1080i 29.97 and am going to compare it to the ProRes version. I doubt that I’d see much difference, and the fact that at this point it is ending up on DVD only…I should have done this from the start. I just wanted to test the new workflow out. If I had a MacPro I would capture ProRes with the capture card. But I am not sure this firewire workflow is worth the potential issues it causes.

I might end up capturing everything as DVCPRO HD…since I have the space and the deck until noon tomorrow.