Re: Working in HDV

Isn't this one of those questions that's better asked before you've captured all the footage? ;-)

For nearly the past two years I've worked at a company where we've done thousands (literally) of short form projects (5-30min) natively in HDV (typically mixed w/DV, DVCPro HD and/or DVCPro 50 footage) and it's not this impossible codec to work with that everyone seems to make it out to be. Would I rather work in DVCPro HD or Pro Res? Yeah, but we don't have the storage capacity for it and I don't like the idea of losing the tape's TC and the ability to batch capture. One of the big reasons to get out of HDV is to get away from the compression and 4:2:0 color space to help keep vfx, gfx, etc., looking clean, but if you are just offlining in HDV that's not a consideration you really need to worry about, IMO. Also, like was mentioned before, you can work natively w/HDV but set the seq to render using ProRes. HDV is also slower when it comes to exports and compression (like making DVDs or web exports for the clients/producers to look at) so that should be factored in as well especially if you are using a non-Intel Mac.


-A