Re: Advice on Capturing in HD (warning: lots of questions!)

Lionel,

As many people have pointed out, there are many routes you can take. The Cineform route will yeild very nice images, but is going to cost you more money. I'm not to familiar with PPro, but I do believe that you can work in DVCPro 100 HD with it. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. DVCPro is a highly compressed format, but will give you more flexibility and HD resolution for an offline. There are many HD shows that are shot and finished in this format. No it's not as good as uncompressed or Cineform, but it is probably a better option for you at the moment. It will allow you more flexibilty for editing, more real-time effects and you can project in HD.

In regards to your storage, Mike points out that with Raid 0 arrays, you are putting yourself at great risk. What type of controller are you using to connect the storage? If you have the option to set up the arrays in either Raid 3 or 5 then you should. If not, since you do have 2 different arrays, you should be able to set them up in a Raid 1 configuration. You will loose half your space, but if you are working in DVCPro, then 5.5 terrabytes is going to be enough and you will have the piece of mind that if a drive goes down, you won't loose all your media.

Everyone hear is listening to you, they all have more experience then you in regards to HD workflows and they are only trying to make sure you don't dig yourself deeper into a hole. There are always more then one way to skin a cat, we just want to make sure you pick the right one. Either way, you will need to test out a workflow before you fully commit, you need to make sure that it is going to work before you start editing the whole thing.

best regards,

jeremy