Part of that interesting online is that a lot of the b-roll used in the cut is DVCPRO HD footage that a production manager shot. The fact that he shot it isn’t interesting…how I am getting the master footage is. You see, he has the tapes, but he also captured this footage into the Avid at high resolution..DNxHD 175. And he had some MPEG-4 versions with timecode so he could shop it around as stock footage. The MPEG-4s is what we used in the offline cut, converted to DV.

But now that the online is upon me, I want the high res stuff. So I can either rent a deck or deal with the Avid files. We weren’t going to rent a deck (money’s tight) so I have to convert the Avid files.

I took the raw .mxf files and put them in an Avid file structure on my external FW drive. AVID MEDIA FILES>1>the files. I then opened Avid MC and made a new DVCPRO HD 720p 23.98 project. I then opened the MEDIA TOOL and searched for the files…they showed up fine, because they were in the proper structure. See, with the Avid media files you need to do this, unlike FCP you can’t just IMPORT the files…Avid won’t allow that. You need to use the Media Tool. That is just how Avid rolls.

Anyway, I loaded the clips into a bin, then loaded them into the Preview Monitor, and exported them as DVCPRO HD QT files. They were now in the DVCPRO HD Avid codec. Meaning that you need the Avid codecs to view these files. Obviously I did. I checked the QT movies and they retained their original timecode.

So far so good, but I am not done yet. Now I need to convert these DVCPRO HD 720p 23.98 files to ProRes 1080i 29.97…progressive to interlaced. So I took them into Compressor, loaded the ProRes 422 for Interlaced onto one of the clips, then modified it. I turned on the FRAME Controls and set things to BEST. Not ALL of them, a couple refer to de-interlacing, and I didn’t want that. I needed them to be interlaced.

After I modified the settings I hit SUBMIT. The sytem estimated 7.5 hours. Fine, as I was leaving for the night. When I returned the next day, they were done. They retained their timecode, but now they were full raster 1920×1080 and 29.97…interlaced Compressor did a pretty good job.

OK, now to recapture the HDV footage.