Edit native HDV or ProRes?

Hi all,

My first purchase into HDV arrived via eBay today - the Canon HV-10. Just playing around. Very impressed so far.

Had a look at the FAQ that suggests (Mr Nattress from memory) that I edit in HDV native in FCP. Other sites I've seen suggest that 6.0.2 can capture into ProRes via Firewire on high enough specced machines, and the quality in graphics improves, and render times are reduced?

What can you HDV gurus advise on this?

Oh and happy new year to you all!.

JR.

Hey Jus - Happy New Year

There's a good new article on this here : When to Stay Native that suggests that going to Pro Res is the duck's ..erm.. pyjamas. Looks sensible to me, but I haven't tried it yet. If you do go this way I'd love to hear what you think of the process.

editing native, but using ProRes as the render codec means you enjoy the smaller file sizes of native HDV but still get all the benefits conferred by ProRes (speed, color space etc) for anything that you render (gfx etc) ... new article aside, its hard to understand why you would not want to do this

I personally would get out of the HDV codec ASAP (on ingest).

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I read the article but I'm still a little confused.

I have been shooting HDV with the Z1U and editing HDV 1060i, and outputting to tape on the Z1U. That has been working fine for me for years. The only downside I'm seeing...based on this article...is the conforming process before I print to video, being rather long (although in my case, once everything is rendered, maybe 5 minutes).

I started a new timeline in Pro Res HQ, and placed a few clips down there. I noticed that even without any filters, every clip is in the "green" render stage. How would this save me time if I had to render every clip...even without color correction or other filters? Is the quality going to be that much different?

I'm using the Mac Pro quad-core and everything gets laid down to the Z1U, I output to my DVD recorder from the tape.

Thanks,
Casey Petersen
www.unitedvideoinc.com

You did not mention you were using your HDV camera as a deck. If that's the case, no reason not to keep everything in native HDV.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Would I need a different deck if I were using the ProRes? Is that how it works?

So since I'm going back to HDV on the Z1U, there's no need to do any extraneous conversion in FCP, right?

Thanks!
Casey Petersen
www.unitedvideoinc.com

Now I'm even more confused....

I just discovered I could capture in ProRes HDV...should I be doing that, and using my timelines in ProRes as well, or was I better off not opening this can of worms?!!

Thanks!!
Casey Petersen
www.unitedvideoinc.com

Haha... i thought there were some proponents of the pro res transfer... Personally, i'll go pro res the moment i can- capture in prores, as HDV might complicate later.

Maybe I'll have to try it in a short project to see what the difference is.

I did a few tests and the results are not what I was expecting. The quality difference is negligible between the HDV and ProRes HQ. File size is supposed to be smaller with ProRes, but what I captured, ProRes gave me a 500 meg file for a 15 second clip, whereas a 2:30 minute clip in HDV was 500 meg. Printing to tape on my Z1U with ProRes took a little bit longer than HDV did for my 40 second demo, but that would translate to a lot longer with a full length project.

For what I'm doing -- wedding videography -- shooting on the Z1U 5 hours of footage, editing down to a 30 minute ceremony, plus 15 minute highlight, and then printing to tape back to the Z1U, transferring the video to a set top DVD recorder, stripping the video and reauthoring to DVD.... is there any advantage to me using ProRes vs. HDV?

I did some more searching on this board and it seems a lot of people like the ProRes and try to avoid native HDV whenever possible.

Are these people talking about capturing ProRes and editing ProRes, or just using the ProRes codec in the render controls?

What's the advantage of using the ProRes codec in the render controls vs. the HDV codec?

Man, this stuff is complicated!

What is the best scenario for using ProRes...if you are capturing HDV and exporting to HDCam or something?

Thanks!!
Casey Petersen
www.unitedvideoinc.com

Wow! you guys are pretty funky! wedding videos in HDV! Cool!


>
> Are these people talking about capturing ProRes
> and editing ProRes, or just using the ProRes codec
> in the render controls?
>

I believe they were talking about capturing in ProRes, due to the higher accuracy of the codec. Staying in a long GOP might lead to further complication later on.

Hmm... why'd you print to tape then author to dvd? why not do that off the mac right off your final edit? You're likely to suffer less drop-out.

Time wise, I haven't worked on HDV yet (hopefully never)... but isn't there an extremely long conforming time before you dump it out to tape? Is there also a long conforming time when you capture as prores?

My decision to print to video vs. encode using Compressor is mostly a time thing. We're doing all our wedding edits in HDV, and we want to keep the edited versions in HDV so that hopefully when we can afford to make the DVDs in HDDVD or BluRay (whichever comes out ahead), that we can easily take the edited HDV version and convert that without having to re-edit everything.

Compressor usually takes us overnight to encode our timelines to DVD...we do this with our rough footage that we give our customers. The edits, however will need to be put on HDV tape eventually, and usually in the interest of time, it is much faster to lay a 15-30 minute edit to tape, transfer the tape to our DVD recorder, extract and reauthor, than it is to spend 2-3 hours encoding (and tying up the edit system) and then author the DVD. Honestly, I like the way the footage looks coming off our DVD recorder...personally I think its' better than the footage off Compressor. Plus, this way, we can be sure that our HDV master is flawless...if there is a problem, we'll know!

Also, to ensure that the print to video goes flawlessly, I always export the finished timeline to a self-contained QuickTime movie, and that's what I print to video.

Conforming time isn't bad. With FCP 5, I remember it used to take quite awhile, but with 6 and our quad-core Mac Pro, it's not bad at all. Typically I render whenever I have some down time (like now when I'm writing this), so everything is caught up pretty close by the time I'm finished, and doing a print to video with a single 15-30 minute clip, it may take as much as 5 minutes to conform to HDV. ProRes seemed to take a little longer with my short clip, and probably would extrapolate to a lot longer with a 15-30 minute project...I don't think I'm going to try it at this point.



Thanks!
Casey Petersen
www.unitedvideoinc.com

Casey,
I own a Canon A1 HDV camcorder. I've been put off by the HDV format for editing because it's really not clear to me how to capture and edit this stuff. Can u explain how you effectively capture HDV? There was some business early on about having to capture with the Apple intermidiate codec then doing this and that. then there was something about not being able to external monitor, either on capture or when editing. It seems like the shooting is easy but the rest of the process is pretty murky. Is there a tried and true method to get this done? I don't want to print to tape but would either down convert to SD 16 x 9 or wait for the HD-DVD war to end.

thx
FC 5.1.4
Intel Macbook pro 17"
firewire 800
23" cinema display
15" NTSC monitor

I'm not familiar with the Canon camera or the Apple intermediate codec.

I did start off with the 17" MacBook Pro when I started editing HDV. I just used the presets that came with FCP...under the Audio/Video settings, in FCP6, I have the sequence preset at HDV 1080i60, the capture preset at HDV, and the device control preset at HDV firewire. I also have the 23" cinema display which is set for video playback.

I've been editing HDV pretty much the same as standard DV...it's all in the settings. Sure there's a bit more rendering and some other time consuming things that come with the territory, but in the end we have an HDV master, so that whenever/whichever HD format wins out, we can easily make the conversion, instead of having to re-edit.

In fact, when we bought the MacBook Pro, that was my first experience with FCP, and I edited for months using HDV before I even tried standard DV.

Casey Petersen
www.unitedvideoinc.com

Well, this sounds too easy. I typically shoot multi-camera theatrical type events that end up being at least an hour. How long do u think it would take to render an HDV timeline with a medium amount of effects and a couple of audio tracks? which, btw, how do u edit the audio? It doesn't appear in the timeline as an aiff file right? or wrong?

I do weddings and concerts mostly...so it's a similar type of edit. I try to do most of my rendering overnight. If there's a general amount of color correction or something on a single camera, I'll usually color correct it first, render overnight, and in the morning export to a new self contained movie and edit with that.

All my audio tracks are AIFFs and they go right on the timeline. I don't use MP3s or for that matter, AIFFs that are 44.1kHz because everything's going to 48 eventually.

Editing HDV isn't hard...it's pretty much the same, just that you have to take a little more consideration with time management for rendering.

A typical wedding ceremony edit with a medium amount of effects may take an hour or so to render, but I usually do that overnight, so I don't really notice. Otherwise, I render in between things like phone calls, emails, lunch, etc.

Casey

thx for the info. I'll try this. I'll be interested to see what the 15 GOP does to transitions and frame critical edit decisions.

I haven't had any problems