HDV on DV timeline

Great forum. Mike looked terrific in Joey's flier. Hope it's okay to be familiar, but you guys are like movie stars to us out here in the audience.

I shot a few tapes on HDV using a Canon HV-20 PAL.

I'm working on a project that was shot in DVcam 4:3 using both a PD 150 and a DSR-300. The ultimate goal is a one-hour doc for broadcast.

I assume the final product will be letter-boxed. Or maybe upconverted to HD. I'm very new to HD and HDV.

What I need is a way to manipulate the HDV footage and put it into DV? My workflow, so far, has been to open a DV-Pal project using easy setup, then capture using a DSR 20 to a OWC 1 tera, using a trusty old G-4 dual 800 and FCP 5.1. I did this because I was on another project in another room while an young assistant did the log and capture of the DV footage onto the OWC using the old G-4.

Then I went to the MBP, which I just bought to get into FCP 6, color, etc,, and opened a new 1080/50 project, and captured 4 HDV tapes using the HV-20 and a MBP and FCP 6.

I did an experiment, used compressor to turn HDV captured clips into mini-DV 4:3 As expected the image came out squeezed. Good to make fat people look thin, but otherwise not accurate representation of the picture.

I then went to the Imac, opened the project in 5.1 as DV-PAL, did a save as another name then imported the HDV footage into a new project

Then i dropped the HDV footage onto the timeline, then zoomed in, or out, to get a useable frame, then rendered the clip. This worked, as you guys know. But is there a better way, once the tapes are shot in HDV?

Oh, and does anyone know how to unlock a MBP DVD Mashita (sp?)867. Very annoying that Apple doesn't make them multi-region.

Thanks for any help you can provide. As a general rule you guys provide great answers. I try to look at this forum a few times a week. I may have missed the answer if it exists. For this I apologize in advance.

G-4 Dual 800
Imac intel G5
15" MBP 2.5 4 gig ram

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Oh, and does anyone know how to unlock a MBP DVD Mashita (sp?)867. Very annoying that Apple doesn't make them multi-region.

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I did my MacPro recently having done my G5 over 4 years ago with no issues - such a shame that they ever invented region encoding as in the UK we have almost all our DVD Players that are available in the shops as Region Free as standard plus our TV sets all work in 60Hz too so we can watch US discs with no issues.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

> As expected the image came out squeezed.

You can add a -33.33 distortion on the clip (it's under the motion tab). Or flag the clip as anamorphic in the browser, and FCP will do the -33.33 distort when you do an insert edit into a 4:3 timeline... Actually... it's here in the FAQ [www.lafcpug.org]

I won't actually advise converting HDV to DV as you'll be piling on a lot of compression on top of a lot of compression...

For the letterbox, you can drag a slug with an matte and invert the effect.

>I assume the final product will be letter-boxed. Or maybe upconverted to HD. I'm very
>new to HD and HDV.

If you're upconverting to HD, you may want to keep the HD footage in HD and edit off a HD timeline (in that case, convert the HDV to ProRes and work from there). Because once you render HD footage in SD, then uprez, the HD footage won't look so good after that.. But then again, how much HD footage are you talking about in relation to the SD footage?

Alternatively, if you keep the HDV footage in HD, you get the option of zooming on the timeline. Personally, I'll convert the HDV to ProRes to prevent any render errors that may result from working with long GOP codecs.

>such a shame that they ever invented region encoding as in the UK

I absolutely agree. I run VLC on macs because of that. It's region 3s here, parallel imports from China are region 6s, American discs are Region 1s, European are region 2s, i think...



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