Making the Switch from SD to HD
by ryan lloyd
on
Sep 17, 2008 at 3:32:15 pm
Hi all
I have been working with Final Cut Pro for several years now and am going to be making the switch for SD to HD soon and was wondering about the practicalities of this.
I want to know what is the best workflow and settings to be using when I change my FCP setup over to HD.
I am using Final Cut Pro version 6.0.4, DVD Studio Pro 4 version 2.4.1, Motion 3 version 3.0.2, compressor 3.0.3.
My camera is a Sony HVR Z1E on which at the moment I am using Sony premium dv mini dv tapes, and I have a Sony HDV vtr deck (HVR-M15U) for logging the tapes. Oh and I usually export through compressor using DVD best quality 90 minutes and burn using DVD studio.
I have played about with some of the settings in FCP but without complete success so I was wondering if anyone could offer me some advice for the best set of settings I need to be using across all my workflows.
Are there any easy solutions and gems of advice about the pitfalls out there, I also (for now) need to be down converting everything back to SD in order to be burned onto standard SD disks.
Any help that may be offered would be much appreciated.
Re: Making the Switch from SD to HD by Chris Poisson on Sep 17, 2008 at 3:40:02 pm
[ryan lloyd]"I want to know what is the best workflow and settings to be using when I change my FCP setup over to HD."
Ryan,
We need to know what you want to do with HD, and how you want to deliver it. Also more about your whole system, as you may need significant hardware to fill the above bill.
Re: Making the Switch from SD to HD by ryan lloyd on Sep 17, 2008 at 4:11:35 pm
Well basically I work for a corporate film maker and although we are fairly geared up for the switch we have never used HD so I am just trying to get my head around it properly before we jump in there.
Initially we would basically be filming in HD but still outputting to SD for DVD and web use of our films.
We are not initially going to be burning in HD onto HD disks as it is not required but we thought it made sense to start working in HD to give ourselves the highest quality source material and the option of outputting to HD in the future.
The systems we use are Mac Pro's with a 2x2 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processor and 4gb of ram, NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics and mac os x.
Not sure if you need any more info than that to go on but appreciate any input.
Re: Making the Switch from SD to HD by walter biscardi on Sep 17, 2008 at 7:00:46 pm
Ryan, the only way to answer your question is to know the exact workflow you're trying to achieve. There are probably more than 20 combinations of HD floating around these days and without knowing what you're trying to and what workflow you're trying to achieve, we're shooting in the dark.
For instance, in our workflow, we get 720 and 1080 material from DVCPro HD and HDV sources. We capture everything to DVCPro HD for the edit, then after we're done color grading in Color, we render that out to ProRes HQ. Our final mastering in house goes out to a Panasonic 1400 DVCPro HD Recorder and more often than not, is also authored to BluRay disc. To support all of this we have very fast hard drive arrays, broadcast accurate CRT and Plasma displays, and AJA Kona 3 boards. You can click on my profile to see the equipment layout of each suite.
So what is the exact workflow you're trying to achieve. Just saying "making the switch from SD to HD" is not much to go on.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Making the Switch from SD to HD by walter biscardi on Sep 18, 2008 at 2:22:17 pm
[Alan Smith]"What is the rationale for capturing DVCPro HD rather than ProRes HQ? If you will do a final render in ProRes, why not capture in ProRes? "
Smaller file sizes.
No issue with pixelation and bad captures that sometimes plagues ProRes. We've had issues capturing to ProRes in the past so we don't do it.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Making the Switch from SD to HD by Chris Borjis on Sep 18, 2008 at 4:15:49 pm
[walter biscardi]"No issue with pixelation and bad captures that sometimes plagues ProRes. We've had issues capturing to ProRes in the past so we don't do it."
walter have you had that at all with SD material in prores?
It's all I've used since fcs2 came out and never had a problem.
I have a quad g5 so I can't even use it for HD capturing anyway.
It worked great for a RED project though.
Re: Making the Switch from SD to HD by walter biscardi on Sep 18, 2008 at 4:43:15 pm
[Chris Borjis]"walter have you had that at all with SD material in prores? "
We have only cut one or two projects in ProRes in SD but didn't see a reason to stop cutting in uncompressed 8bit for SD. The projects are only 2 minutes long. No we did not see that in those two SD projects.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
