Hey guys. I was wondering if anyone here has any experience doing visual effects projects with HDV.

Here is my situation. Our school will be ordering the new Sony HD cam. My plan is to film everything at 1080i, then deinterlace that to be 1080p at 30p. Then take THAT, and downrez it to 1280x720p for doing visual effects work. Then output the FINAL project at 720p.

What would you guys say is the best workflow for this. I plan to work FULLY uncompressed throughout the whole project. Also, about 40% of the film will be blue/greenscreen shots. 90% of the film will require CGI shots of some kind.

Can HDV pull this off, or should I just rent and XL2 and do the film on that?

Well if you want to output at 720p then I really doubt you'd be happy with what you'll get from an XL2, relative to starting with HDV footage.

(It depends a bit on what you will be using the 720p for....for instance, why not just stay in 1080i the whole way through?)

I've done a few quick tests in Lightwave 7.5 & 8 using 720p 30fps footage from my HD10u converted to AVI and WMV9 HD.....basically backdrops for models to render over. I wanted to see what codecs imported best into LW - which I prefer to 3D Studio Max - how it would handle the HD footage, and what sort of workflow I'd have to develop for adding CGI to HDV.

It most definitely works, but be prepared for some long render times if you have reflections, particle effects or radiosity......distributed network rendering is looking mighty attractive!!!

Thanks guys. No other opinions?

<<<-- Originally posted by Daniel Broadway : Thanks guys. No other opinions? -->>>

Obviously not!!!

But here's some very short HD10 footage integrated into a simple LW object....just shows it can be done.

Go to:

www.pnc.com.au/~scris/hd_images/

and download:

Zig-Zag engine on page 1.wmv


(1280x720 30fps 5Mbit)

Well, I guess I should have mentioned this earlier, but I am also planning on doing extensive blue/greenscreen shots with the FX1. Will HDV be more/less troublesome to do bluescreen keying with? I hope less so. Anyway, thoughts on keying with HDV would be appreciated.

The Sony cams are a unknown right now. The de-interlacing will be time consuming and may give you problems with blue screen. As well being the consimer cam, it may have edge enhancement or chroma problems, the later of which can usually be fixed. How it performs just won't be known untill it's released.

I've done a lot of chromakeying with minidv and am finally satisfied with the newest pro version of After Effects that ships with "keylight" plugin for chromakeying.

This plugin is tremendously forgiving and customizable - I've saved shots that wouldn't work any other way and have used them in final projects.

If HDV chromakeying won't be any worse than mini-dv than we should be okay - some software out there will do it, as long as you've lit properly and are willing to spend some time in post taking care of spills and matte, etc.

Steve Crisdale - I too use lightwave quite a bit and am curious to know your findings regarding codecs etc. when working with HDV material...

Yes, I am studying visual effects in college to eventually be an effects artist. I've used Keylight, and it's awesome. Here is a shot I keyed with it.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v58/PixelMagic/DVsuperbrawlComp.jpg

<<<-- Originally posted by Daniel Broadway : Well, I guess I should have mentioned this earlier, but I am also planning on doing extensive blue/greenscreen shots with the FX1. Will HDV be more/less troublesome to do bluescreen keying with? I hope less so. Anyway, thoughts on keying with HDV would be appreciated. -->>>

There was a sample clip done a while back of some green screened HD10 video that looked OK to me. The author maintained that HD was easier to green/blue screen because of the higher detail.

If you've ever created a mask in Photoshop, you'll appreciate the argument for more resolution providing a cleaner mask....so I guess the logic of HD giving better chroma keying is sound.

Mark, the codec that I most use for video input (backgrounds, mapped planar surface, etc.) is AVI, though LW8 will accept WMV (I haven't tried Quicktime - I'm just a bit disappointed in QT's HD capabilities). AVIs of HD video can chew through Hard Disk space in no time, so the WMV option in LW8 is welcome to me (the steam train clip I used came to 3Gig as an AVI!!!). LW also has HD resolution camera settings to aid in rendering - they obviously think HD has a future!!!