OK, so on this side doc that I am apparently taking FOREVER to finish, I have a challenge. The challenge is that 60% of it was shot with the HVX-200 at 720p24…and about 40% of it was shot HDV 1080i…but at 24p. So I have DVCPRO HD 720p at 23.98 and HDV 1080i 29.97…but with pulldown somewhere in there. How am I going to get this HDV footage to the format I need?

Well, I knew that I needed to first remove the pulldown. But you can’t do that with GOP formats like HDV and XDCAM…you need to convert it first. BUT…DVCPRO HD 720p is a 59.94 format and only 29.97 formats can be reverse telecined. What a pickle! So I had to convert to ProRes 1080i 29.97. I did that easiliy enough with Compressor. Then I reverse telecined with Cinema tools…and that looked fine. But then i remembered this article:

Final Cut Pro 6: 1080p24 workflow for Canon HV20 camcorder

Ahhh…I could do this in one pass. OK, I used Compressor to convert HDV 1080i 29.97 to ProRes 1080p 23.98. That looked good. But I needed DVCPRO HD 720p 23.98. OK then, ANOTHER pass in Compressor to get it to 720p DVCPRO HD. OK, that worked and it looks fine…but now I have transcoded twice…and I have quality loss.

Hmmm…Why not do it all at once? Convert to DVCPRO HD 720p and reverse telecine the footage (that is 29.97) to 23.98? I thought that since HDV was a GOP format, I’d need to first convert to an I Frame format…but the article proved that I didn’t. It converted and reversed…it must have done it in that order. So I did the exact same steps, but chose DVCPRO HD 720p instead of ProRes.

Looked great. Perfect. So one pass conversion of HDV 1080i 29.97 to DVCPRO HD 720p 23.98. This only worked because they shot 24p…or 24F rather…on a Canon HV20. I this won’t look right with regular HDV 1080i60. Well, it might not, I don’t have footage to test.

So ALL I have to do is separate out all the HDV footage, media manage it to another location, batch transcode/rev. telecine with Compressor (that’ll take a while), and then manually cut it back into the show. Whoooo….that is a lot of footage.