HDV Reformatting Help (from previous post)

Hello friends!! So I started a few days ago with needing help with re-formatting HDV captured footage to Pro-Res 422 (HQ) for use in Color, and got some wonderful help - but discovered something new that i wanted to see if you guys recognized:

I'm relatively new to HDV, but I was cutting in HDV with the intention of finishing the cut and then outputting to Pro-Res for color grading, but i noticed that when I output a QT, it looked TERRIBLE when i tried to play it - like it was interlaced broadcast rez footage - but now i'm wondering if the data stream might just be to heavy for my dual 1.8ghz Powermac... LAFCPUG suggested that instead of outputting QT's that I change the sequence settings and re-render, but i got the same result - it looked terrible when i played it - BUT after I tried changing the settings of a newly duplicated sequence to the sequence preset for Pro-Res 422 (HQ) - but i've now noticed a detail!

when the image is playing, it looks blurry, compressed, and interlaced (there's a guy with a shirt that has diag and horiz pinstripes, black stripes on white like a grid so it's perfect for analysis - and the lines swim around and moray like interlaced footage on a progressive monitor) - BUT - when i STOP playing, the image instantly sharpens to look perfect. I've rendered everything so it's all the happy light-blue color - but is FCP downconverting the footage to a data rate that my 4 year old machine can handle and THAT's why it looks crappy?? But the render is actually fine and would play normally on a faster machine? I'm running it on a FW800 drive.

any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks guys!

That's correct. Your timeline cannot be played back in real time on your system, so Final Cut is playing back preview quality (which I think is quarter-resolution).

If you have the storage bandwidth, uncompressed would be a much better choice for you. ProRes is a very computationally intensive format.

Thanks for sniffing this out, Jeff! It all makes sense...

I can store uncompressed, but if my system is choking on Pro-Res, won't it choke even more heartily on Uncompressed?

What about DVCproHD? Any other suggestions?

Thanks so much!

ProRes is, as I said, a very computationally intensive format. Your computer isn't fast enough to decode and play it back at full quality in real time.

DVCPRO HD and HDV are similar in that they're both visibly compressed. Depending on what kind of footage you shot, maybe either one would have been okay for acquisition. But converting from one to the other will visibly degrade your footage. You'll see the difference. (HDV is more temporally compressed, while DVCPRO HD is more spatially compressed.)

AH - gotcha. that makes total sense...

Thanks again for the advice, i'll give it a shot today!