ًًWhat is(are) the best CS4 work flow(flows) to keep edited footage quality as close to the original?

editing HDV using premiere pro 4.2

It depends on if you have a lot of effects, color-correction, After Effects type work on your productions. If you do, using an intermediate codec like Cineform is very good. That adds lots of advantages and gives you a final master that can be output to various targets (DVD, Bluray, Flash, etc) with very high quality. Plus, with Cineform, you can bump your HDV to full square pixel 1920x1080, which usually will give you better quality output to various different formats.

If you have very few effects or changes with your productions, using a regular Premiere HDV workflow is probably best.

thank you Stephen for your info,

i work straight foreword documentary style and i have already transferred the HDV footage (15 hrs) into CS4, will i still be able to use cinform?

Use Cineform Propect2K/ProspectHD intermediate codec. You can process in 10 bits and it maintains its quality through multiple encodes even if you add a lot of filters. You also end up with an archive quality file of relatively small size. Cineform has a utility that will allow you to transcode your HDV to the Cineform format.

thank you all.......one last Q before i use cineform:

if i have did a rough cut for my footage on the timeline would i be able to use cineform
or i must re-edit again?

thank you so much

I'm not sure about this, Abd. I know that when I was using Cineform (before Premiere supported AVCHD) I would have to transcode my AVCHD files to the Cineform format before I could use them with a Cineform Premiere Pro project setting.

(When installing Cineform, it will add many presets to PP4 that are specifically for use with your Cineform encoded files. It will also give you a one-time-push-button option to "fix" After Effects so that Cineform files may be easily edited in AE as well)

My guess is that you will first have to transcode your HDV files to Cineform. I wish I could tell you that you could just unlink your HDV clips and relink them to their Cineform counterparts but I'm not sure. You may have to start from scratch with a Cineform project setting.

However I would ask in the Cineform forum, also located here at DVinfo.net. I'm sure they can give you an answer.

thank you again Rob, i DL the cineform, i will try it myself and see how it works....

all the best for all....