Re: ProRes via Convergent HD,and AJA, or Capturing HDV via Firewire

As far as capture goes...HDV is captured via that same FW connection and takes the exact same amount of space...25Mb/s. I'm not sure why you wouldn't simply capture the HDV this way.

ProRes is great...but it is still compression. If you convert on ingest to ProRes, you'll have FAR bigger files, and the image doesn't improve, it gets transcoded, and following up one kind of compression with another kind, even if it's high quality, isn't gaining you anything.

By ingesting small HDV files...and editing them on an uncompressed timeline, you'll re-apply no compression until you're done and want to master it out...and then you'll be preforming the first transcode on the footage...post-edit. If you transcode on ingest, that's once, then you transcode after edit for BluRay or DVD, that's two transcodes.

DVcam is taking up the same space as the HDV would...and if the FW works, I'm not sure why you would work this way...even if you are attempting to master out to SD, editing in HD over DV will give you a better quality product, even after you downconvert after editing.



TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

CPO, Digieffects