Hi all, I am new to HDV and I am going crosseyed looking for info on the best way to ingest 1080i 24f footage, shot to tape on my XH-A1, into FCP6 on a Power Mac.

Sales staff at the varoius supply houses all suggest buying a Sony Deck, and or a Blackmagic Intensity card. It seems to me though that none of the current decks, or affordable capture cards, support my preferred format, 1080i 24f, am I missing something?

Is firewire transfer from the camera still the best, or only, option?

Is there any advantage to having an Intensity card in my machine other than for the HDMI out port for playback to an HD TV?

Thanks for your input and experience.

Rich.

Hi Richard, a Sony HDV deck will not support 24F. There's nothing wrong with playing the tape directly from your XH A1 in VCR mode and capturing through FireWire. If you don't want to use your A1 as a deck, then either of the two Canon consumer HDV camcorders (HV10 and HV20) can be used as a deck and both support 24F playback.

The A1 records 24f through 60i, so you should be fine playing it back on any HDV deck that can play back the Canon HDV Stream format. If you shoot 24f remember to pulldown!

Hey Greg, On the A1 with 24f are you sure you need to use the pull down? I thought i read somewhere that it was not needed or its automatically done. one of the two. Could be wrong...

That's not exactly accurate, about the pulldown. The 24F in HDV comes into FCP as "real" 24p. NO pulldown. In shooting SD you have the pulldown option, but you're talking about HDV. It's 24p, no pulldown option. Nothing will play the Canon's 24F HDV footage except the Canon cameras, ie., the XL H1, the XH A1/G1, and the little single chip HV10 and HV20.

All you have to do in FCP is use the 1080P24 setup and make sure your sequence settings match. I think in FCP6 that happens automatically, but I'm not sure. I'm using 5.1.4 and I have to do the Easy Setup, then the sequence setting.

I've had absolutely no problems editing HDV, 24P, in FCP. It works just like DV editing, except that some of the effects have to render, and the sequence has to "conform" before exporting.

I don't have an HD monitor, so I can't watch my stuff on anything other than the computer monitors while I'm editing. What I do for color correction is change the output setting to DV, and I can see a still frame on my NTSC monitor. It won't play, but a freeze is good enough for color correction. An HD monitor would be nice.

I have had great luck with:

Shoot A1 > put tape in HV20 > go through HDMI into Blackmagic card (and 1394 for device control), edit as true 24p HDMI material.

But typically I use my A1 to capture HDV

Matthew,

Could you please elaborate on that?

Which Blackmagic card?
Are you using Vegas?
What setting/file format do you cap at?
What’s the specs of your system?

I’m looking to go that way too and have been using the HV20 as a deck.

if space is an issue, this is a great drive. i've filled about 700G withn 3 months with no problems. it's very fast and stable at both firewire 400 and 800. it also comes set up as raid 0. there's a new 1.5TB as well..but for $300, the price is right.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822204022