DVCPRO HD Offline/Online Workflow
by jason giberti
on
Oct 3, 2008 at 5:05:08 pm
Hello
Im an editor working for the first time on a large scale HD project. The project has over 200 hours of footage shot on DVCPRO 1080i50. Im looking for the best offline/online workflow from someone with experience and would really appreciate some input.
Im running: FCP 6.0.1, AJA ioHD, Panasonic a AJ-HD1400
I obviously need to work offline to save drive space but don't want to have any surprises when I online to 1080i ProRes 422.
Re: DVCPRO HD Offline/Online Workflow by Mads Nybo Jørgensen on Oct 4, 2008 at 2:16:07 pm
Hey Jason.
Buy yourself a hard drive - a big hard drive - a raid with protection would be a good idea.
Make sure to number your tapes - starting from "001" is always a good idea - don't give them silly long names that no edl will be able to transfer to an on-line suite, if and when you'll be required to do that.
All the Best
Mads
London, UK
Mac Million Ltd. - HD Production & Editing
Please watch our latest video on Data Protection at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVyv_lTywwc
Blog: http://blog.myspace.com/bigflopproductions
Re: DVCPRO HD Offline/Online Workflow by Saul Budd on Oct 8, 2008 at 5:08:58 pm
I haven't yet found a completely fool-proof method in FCP (and I've tried a number of different suggestions from the Cow and elsewhere), so I'm afraid you are probably going to have to expect for the odd nasty surprise. With that setup you should be prepared (and schedule accordingly) for the following :
Frame accuracy consistency issues capturing from the AJ-HD1400 via firewire (essential to preserve the native quality of the DVCPRO HD), you should check after your first couple of tapes (during both the offline capture and the conform process) that your captures/re-captures are frame accurate. There seems to be an element of luck here, the same system with the same setup will be fine one day and inaccurate the next, power cycling the lot just before you start capturing seems to help. Either way, you'll probably have to check every cut against the original to see if it matches.
Problems with sped-up, slowed-down, reversed or speed-ramped shots. The Media Manager (which you need to make your offline copy for recapture) in FCP has had trouble with these for longer than I care to remember. Sometimes it will be fine, but if you have a complicated sequence you may find yourself having to fix a large number of these.
Problems with freeze-frames, these don't carry across very well and often have to be recreated.
Problems with stills/square-pixel graphics/mixed formats etc. The "make offline copy" process expects DV in, DVCPRO out ... it gets a bit confused when you have other formats to be reconnected (rather than recaptures), for example, square pixel stills in your timeline often don't get scaled up properly and your distort and scale factors have to be tweaked to exactly match the original (particularly annoying when you have a complicated bit of rostrum)
Filters using pixel values (e.g. blurs) do not scale up and may need to be adjusted to get the intended result.
All these problems should be checked against an upconverted quicktime of your SD sequence which you can lay with a crop and/or reduced opacity on top of your conform sequence as a guide.
