Editing in native HDV ?
by Fredy Schwerdtner
on
Dec 20, 2008 at 7:27:39 am
Dear Fellows ......
I'm on a cross road. I've been reading many things in internet but I have not reached or got a solution.
I will shoot on next sunday some receipies videos. We will use 2 cameras.; HVR-Z1 and HVR-A1U. The final product will be a SD DVD, since the bluerays are not yet popular and spread over the market, but we thought in shoot on HDV and capture with ProRes 422 HQ to have the best quality of our Master material for a future HD DVD / Blueray DVD. But some issues come to my mind:
I've just read an article from Philip Hodgetts in Ken Stone's website where he says about HDV: " Stay native when outputting to HDV, DVD, HD DVD or to the web, otherwise convert to ProRes 422 after initial capture (via FireWire), or convert during."
If this is true, I guess I should not convert the HDV material to ProRes, since I'm going, for a while, to make just SD DVDs or should I shoot in DV or DVCam ?
How about the color sampling / quality, between HDV 4:2:0 and ProRes 4:2:2 ?
But should I shoot in HDV, as both cameras can do, for a future conversion to ProRes to author a Blueray DVD ?
Also, will it save me a lot of space in my external HDs ?
How is the best way to output my HDV timeline to Compressor ?
Please, give me some light in this dark night ....
Re: Editing in native HDV ? by Jeff Mack on Dec 20, 2008 at 3:26:21 pm
Fredy,
If you understand the HDV codec, you wil understand the shortcomings during the edit process. The HDV codec realy becomes difficult when you have lots of graphics and if the action is fast. That's why pro res is suggested - because that gets you away from the inherent problems with HDV. If there are no difficult edits, you will save a ton of space by staying HDV. Exporting a quicktime movie to whatever dvd authoring will be easy to do. If you transcode hdv to pro res, you will not gain any quality because your quality will only be as good as you capture on tape. In fact, whenever you transcode, you actually lose some due to taking a 422 sampling instead of a 444 sampling. The benefits of pro res for editing can overide any transcode loss. Many say the loss is impercetible. I don't have the equipment to make the determination and perhaps I will test visually and answer this for myself.
Re: Editing in native HDV ? by Fredy Schwerdtner on Dec 20, 2008 at 6:47:40 pm
Let me try to explain what the job is ...…
Three months ago I started doing editing jobs for a company of a friend of mine. You probably know how difficult is working for a friend, specially if he is that kind of a childhood friendship that is following you since you are a little person. But we are doing very good in our business relationship. That's what friends are for ... and he likes my editing jobs.
Usually his company sells training videos for many kind of companies. Selling it on DVDs and offering it over the internet on his "Training TV".
Now we are working on a new segment . We are making cuisine recipes videos, which will also be offered in the same way. I've already edited 200 videos for the website. My friend asked me to be on the set since the day one to help him. When I've got there they were about to shoot in DVCam - 4:3 . Since, by that time, I had no clues about HDV, I let it go and said nothing about the codec used by them (DVCAM), but I advised him to shoot anamorphic 16:9 since the widescreen TVs are spreading like fire in the forest ... and they did it so.
Tomorrow we gonna start shooting a group of recipes specially for a DVD Edition. We will be using those two cameras I've mentioned before and I've advised him to shoot in HDV ( poor of me ... :-) ).
So I've been working on my Macbook Pro 2.5 Intel core 2 Duo with 4GB on RAM and FCS 2 and I have 4 external HDD, 2 USB Western Digital 7200 rpm of 500 GB and 2 LaCie - 7200 rpm (USB, Firewire 400 and 800) of 500 GB.
We are planning to shoot around 12 different recipes . Many Scenes and Takes and 2 Angles (cameras). Most of the time we do dry cuts ( I don't know if this is a right english expression ) and some transitions. Some filters here and there and some white balance and color correction on FCP because I haven't started working with Color yet.
Would you advised me to go to ProRes on those recipes with transitions, effects and filters used ? Or could I stay with HDV ?
Would I have any issue putting together on the same DVD sequences edited in HDV and ProRes ( If you say Yes for the first answer ) ?
Thanks a lot ...
Re: Editing in native HDV ? by Jeff Mack on Dec 20, 2008 at 8:10:07 pm
Hi Fredy,
Sounds like a fun project. First off, what you said about the edits sounds like HDV will work just fine. Please don't have a bad impression of HDV. It really looks nice. Again, once you totally understand Long Gop compression (Group of Pictures), you will know when HDV might not be the best choice. Google up long gop and even search here for that info. Pro res is I frame compression so it works much better when the situations that don't work well for HDV.
The next thing is USB drives are not fast enough for pro res. You shouldn't even use them for HDV. They are fine for storage but capturing to could result in dropped frames during capture.
Jeff
Re: Editing in native HDV ? by Ed Dooley on Dec 20, 2008 at 10:53:18 pm
For video with simple cuts and dissolves, and not a lot of fancy graphics, I would also edit in HDV. I also agree that you shouldn't use the USB drive for editing. The 500g FireWire 800 drive will hold a lot of HDV.
Ed
Re: Editing in native HDV ? by Ed Dooley on Dec 21, 2008 at 5:49:02 am
I do it all the time. I try to process the stills as completely as possible elsewhere though. Color correction is done in Photoshop, and most importantly motion and scaling is done in After Effects then imported in to FCP (Motion is better for that than FCP too).
Ed
[Fredy Schwerdtner]"Do you think that I should stay on HDV even if after shooting we decide to include some still pictures and some Livetype material ?"
Re: Editing in native HDV ? by Fredy Schwerdtner on Dec 21, 2008 at 12:15:36 am
Ed, sorry, I've forgot to ask ....
Everybody says that to work with HDV and ProRes we have to have a RAID. Should I reformate my 2 firewire 800 HD as a RAID ?
Re: Editing in native HDV ? by Sebastian Alvarez on Dec 26, 2008 at 9:33:04 pm
I don't see the point of transcoding to another format, even if it's not extremely lossy, but lossy nevertheless, just to edit HDV. This format is very easy to edit and it doesn't require much CPU. Transcoding to ProRes might make sense if you are editing AVCHD, which is hard to edit in its native form because of the CPU requirements, and Final Cut Pro can't even edit without transcoding it to ProRes 422. But Vegas can take AVCHD natively, and Premiere Pro CS4 does even a better job giving you smoother playback than Vegas. But for HDV, even when I had a Core 2 Duo I was able to edit it smoothly. And I think FCP can edit it natively as well.
Re: Editing in native HDV ? by Chris Simpson on Dec 27, 2008 at 4:31:41 pm
I've just finished editing my first HDV project, having previously down converted in camera to dv all year (I produce multi (5) camera coverage kart racing as SD dvds) and I have to say after being nigglingly annoyed that I haven't been exploiting the true potential of my better cameras (Sony V1, HC5, HC7), and a desire to do Hi Def, particularly for on line streaming, but because I like a challenge. I was fearing the worst and that it would be a struggle to edit, after just mastering multi cam sequence of DV to speed up my workflow.
After extensive web reading here and elsewhere. I plumped for capturing as Pro Res (not Pro Res HQ), as I have a lot of on screen graphics and as Apple's codec I thought it might cope with 3 Pro Res 1440 x 1080 50i clips better. It has taken a little longer to do, but only because you can't leave FCP to batch capture, and have to capture now, and I've discovered the need to use Unlimited RT in the timeline)
And its worked fine, its probably imperceptible, but I think on my cinema display, there is an ever so slightly better colour, when I sent it through Compressor (fearing the worst again from reading) the output for a Best Quality 90min SD dvd was just good, no different, to the SD DVD I'd been producing from dv footage. And no interlacing issues, as I've mentioned about.
As to outputting back to tape, well this has proved slightly problematic, Print to Video as HDV does work, but its a bit trial and error, my FCP seems a tad moody, remember to check automatically start recording in the PTV window, but it does work, but I spent a lot of time in the AV Settings changing stuff backwards and forwards, trying to get FCP to show Render from In to Out. in the Sequence drop down, so that PTV dialogue box would PTV from In to Out. Never figured out what I was doing wrong or right, but it eventually works. This is not issue for dv,
Reading through this thread, I see someone says you need a RAID to work with Pro Res, I feared this, as all this RAID business is bit, rocket science to me, and don't like messing with my set up, for fear of doing something catastrophic a hang over from my PC days, & considered a drobo, as I shoot and edit video, and not a tech persay, but it has not proved to be an issue. I've been working with FCP on a main drive, and project and capture scratch on a 2nd internal, both fairly standard Mac Pro Seagate 7200 drives. I don't know if my Mac Pro would be classed as a beast or not, it does have 14 Gb RAM, Radeon 1900XT, and 2.5TB of storage across 4 drives, it probably doesn't need 14 Gb RAM, but I ascribe to the notion that it can't hurt.
I wanted to Hi Def output so I can post it on line as well. Is there a simple, reliable, relatively cheap burning Blu Ray DVDs solution out there?
I've now bought another HC5 and an HC7, and hope to get HXR Sony POV, if its not extortionate, to do onboard HDV next year. So I'll see if it can handle 6 Pro Res streams in a Multi Cam sequence.
As to file sizes I think I was getting 3mins of DV per Gb, I think roughly Pro Res is about 45secs per Gb.
As to HDV and long GOP, its not been as bad as people say, although I haven't needed to get into colour correction, I find manual white balancing and Sony's idea of colour is good enough.
