I have a small 30 sec spot I am doing for broadcast in a theme park in-house video network. I am assembling the spot from footage I shot with my HVR-Z1U. The park gave me the guidelines for submitting the finished clip. They want it submitted in HDCam format. I don’t have the hardware to do this myself, so I will have to hand of the file on disc and have someone print to tape. My question is what should my workflow be in FCP. What format should I edit in, and what should I output the finished piece in? Also I want to do a lot of treatments in After Effects. What format import and output back to FCP? Any help making this transition happen would be very helpful.

Capture it as native HDV edit away then in your timeline settings change your render settings to render Pro Res. When you're done make a self contained Pro Res quicktime file burn it as a data disc, hand it off to a facility to dump it to HDcam for you.

Having someone dump it to HDcam for you will probably cost 200 bucks.

I did find out that the facility using my tape will accept the project in DVcam format, I imagine the ProRes to HDcam will look much better? Also what format do I export out of After Effects to keep as much resolution as possible?

You'll want to stay in Pro Res HD because DVcam is SD so essentially you would be downconverting your footage loosing quality and they would then be upconverting.

Best to render out of AE as Pro Res HQ 1920x1080

Is working in Pro Res HD going to be a problem for my G5 Dual core? I also don't have a SATA Raid, I have plenty of internal storage and a external FW 800. I also have alot of RAM. Plus the spot is only 30sec long. I can't wait to upgrade to a Intel box.

Your G5 / External FW drive should work fine with Pro Rez, G5's cannot capture/encode realtime Pro Rez HD. Thats were the horsepower is really needed.
I work at a transfer house here in Atlanta and we do FCP Edit to Tape to HDCam or just about any other tape format. Not sure about the rates (I'm just the FCP op) but I hear we are the cheapest in town. PM me if you'd like to know more.

yes that would be great, shoot me you contact info at pylon@comcast.net Thanks again.

I recently bought an HDV deck and know that I will have to master to HD and digibeta so I chose the sony HVR-35E as it also has an HD/SD-SDI (serial digital interface) output so I can use it with the above formats.

I agree though that going pro res in FCP is also the best option if you dont have a deck.

Help...I just tried to export out of After Effects 7 and I don't have the ProRes option...I just upgraded my FCP to Studio 2 and did not have enough coin left over to upgrade After Effects to CS3. I don't have any experience running Motion so I don't want to try and learn as the production cycle for this project is short. Is there another codec I could come out of After Effects 7 (even if its overkill) to preserve as much resolution as ProRes...by the way what's the difference between ProRes and ProRes HQ? Thanks for any help.

Hopefully someone will know what I need to do here. ...(First see my previous post)... What has changed now is, I went ahead and upgraded my After Effects to CS3. So now I am in a comfortable environment to do so compositing work for this 30-sec spot. The work flow ( I thought) was going to be go ProRes on individual clips out of FCP....import into After Effects do my stuff and export back out as ProRes into FCP to do the final edit....but now I am reading that After Effects CS3 does not do ProRes with any consistency or at all. My time is slipping away and I am still dealing with pre production software issues. Help! I could just say to hell with and down convert everything to DV but I have all this sweet high energy HDV footage, and I want to deliver looking better then DV. What should I encode coming out of FCP, that AFX could read and then what should I use coming out of AFX....Animation codec? I should get my AFX upgrade today, I need to start production...I am going to deliver the finished project to a local outfit to encode to HDCam.