HDV to ProRes workfolw?

Hi All:

Would anybody please recommend the best workflow for a project that will be shot in HDV
and that will be finished in FCP and Color. Should I go to ProRes at some point before going to Color, because of the 4:2:0 of HDV?

Thanks,

Gualex

Check out this nice tutorial by Phillip Hodgetts : When to stay in the native codec

Thanks Jude,

Gualex

i'm working an a long form doco shot on HDV.
we'll be delivering HD,
and Pro Res & Color may well be part of the workflow.


but i thought about it, and decided to go with a more traditional off-line / on-line path.
there's a LOT of material, and we jsut didnt have the space to capture as Pro Res
and HDV seemed to have problems with doing exports in a hurry.

so we captured as DV, and will Media Manage and re-capture down the track.
most likely we'll re-capture as ProRes.



nick

Nick have you tested that?

We are finding that there's up to a second difference in timecode when captured from the DV for offline and HDV for online. Also, as strange as this might sound, for this to have any chance of working correctly we had to use the same tape deck to re-capture that we used to capture the original or we got really funky results.

"Nick have you tested that?"

well, yes, and no.

on the last doc i made with the same people.
we batch captured about 6 minutes worth of HDV
and didn't have one single problem.

this was back in FCP5.0 something.
we WERE using the same camera to capture from.
and we were capturing as HDV.

we could use the same cameras this time, too if we really have to.
we've shot on an both a Z1P and a V1U
what are you using?

i'll do some tests on this film to see what we're up against.
thanks for the warning, Chuck.


nick

I'm not sure there's a problem. I have just encountered some strangeness with working with HDV and converting to ProRes.

Most of the footage we get is shot on Z1's and the occasional JVC JY110's with most of the capture done with the Sony M25U. Its all 60i HDV.

We are so tired of the conform times that we have just begun capturing ProRes via Firewire from the M25U and noticed that there were frames missing from where we began the capture and from the new clips that are automatically made at every start-stop.

I suspect it has something to do with the 15 frame long GOP, I guess its theoretically possible to be out of sync 14 frames either side of an I frame. So far it has never really caused a problem but I see where it might in a documentary where every frame might count.

This might also have more to do with the ProRes capture from HDV which was not available in FCP 5x. Anyway just thought you might want to test it a bit more so that you don't find out later there's a problem.

Good luck.

"noticed that there were frames missing from... the new clips that are automatically made at every start-stop."

i got that even when capturing as HDV:
1 frame missing from the head of every shot.

i was getting TOO MANY clips, anyway,
so i just disabled that function (it's new-ish in the HDV log & capture window)


cheers,
nick