Little Frog in High Def

Sorry for my ignorance (never used HD), but what exactly is the point? I thought that because HDV was the same size stream as DV, using the FCP HDV codec would be a suitable work flow? Is the FCP HDV codec not suitable for finishing in?

The point is that Native HDV is a pain to work with on many levels. And many many people, including Sony (that say this about XDCAM as well) say to get out of HDV as soon as possible and into an I Frame 4:2:2 codec. Rendering will look MUCH cleaner, and the 4:2:2 color space gets you much more information to work with than the HDV/XDCAM 4:2:0 color space, which makes for superior color correction.

Long GOP compression is NOT a good thing to deal with in post. Render and export times are increased 300%-500%…so get it out of that format when you can.

And start reading the FCP forums…glean them for information about HDV…see what people are saying.

And no, HDV is not a suitable finishing format….professionally. No one accepts an HDV master, which is fine because you cannot output timecode to HDV, a vital part of a professional delivery.

Finishing formats for HD are HDCAM SR, HDCAM, D5 and sometimes DVCPRO HD.

Yea sorry about that, the fact that proress is 422 and has 1 frame compression makes it pretty obvious…

one thing to remember is that there is nothing to be gained (other than file size) by transcoding to ProRes at capture, when you consider that you can set FCP to use ProRes as the render codec anyway. by doing so the transcode only happens as and when its needed.

Good point Andy. I haven’t worked with it enough to know.

But I will be soon. I just accepted a job that was shot on HDV. Here goes!

Does rendering HDV in ProRes (as the render codec) run as fast as rendering ProRes in ProRes? I need to run some tests to find out.

I’ve been cutting a show for national broadcast that’s been shot on HDV for almost 2 years – it’s not that bad of a format to cut with. Not perfect, but not bad. In the end, I have to render the entire show to a different codec so it can be laid down to HDCAM tape for broadcast in HD. An extra step, but also a good excuse for a long lunch.

-Ben Rowland

I’ll be dealing with HDV soon too, I did get that HV20 I mentioned in a previous post and plan on shooting some tests real soon. It definitely looks like a challenge especially when I’m still using 5.1.4.

William, if you have FCP 5.1.4, you cannot capture HDV as ProRes. That is only available with 6.0.2. You can only capture as Native HDV or AIC.

Shane – you’re right regarding the ProRes codec but I’ve found some resources online that say it’s possible with versions prior to 6 so I’ll give it a try. Of course the ultimate goal here is to get into a more workable, cleaner codec. Here is what I found by way of a workaround. Not sure how it works until I try. If not, I guess I’ll just bite the bullet and upgrade my Studio.

If you shoot with a hv20 in 24p mode and capture to prores will it do the pulldown for you? Leaving you with a 1080p24 ProRes file?

Dunno, as I do not have the HV20.