I'm sure that this has been covered in part elsewhere...

We are in prep for a 6 episode wildlife series over here in Mozambique and I am trying to work out a decent workflow solution.

We are shooting with 4 cameras;
-Z1E HDV shooting 1080i (for the UW sequences)
-HD100E shooting 720p (probably 25p or 30p considering the current lack of 24p support) (Topside)
-Aaton S16mm TC'ed to either HD or direct to disk, either way it will end up as HD on a drive (Highspeed)
-Nikon D70 timelapse station- resized frames bought in from PS

The output will be:
-SD broadcast here
-SD DVD

We also want to keep the potential to produce an HD-DVD as and when this is a realistic option.

So essentially we want to edit in HDV and have our HDV master downconverted to SD for broadcast here.

Questions are:

We like the progressive frame look but i'm not happy about turning the 1080i into 25P... is it best to go the other way and convert all into interlaced for the edit? Are there other options (DVCPRO)?

Is there a perfect workflow that anybody can suggest?

Are there any good HD-SD software standards convertors, can this be done in FCP?

As you can probably tell I am not an editor by training, all this may be very simple stuff.

Any ideas from the experts wiill be appreciated,

J

I was going to advice you to convert everything to uncompressed 720p25 before editing, but I noticed that neither AJA nor Blackmagic Design support 720p25, which means you can't color correct on a decent monitor. Other people can correct me if I'm wrong.

Final Cut Pro does not support HDV 720p25 either, which means you can't log and capture the material from the JVC HD100. Look at at HDVxDV for a solution for this. Maybe Apple will solve this with a new version expected to arrive at NAB 2006 (april 22-27).

This means that there are to options left: 1080p25 (really 1080i50 with everything deinterlaced) or SD 25p.

I wouldn't try to edit all your different kinds of footage in an HDV timeline.

I would agree that editing in HDV with mixed formats is a potential problem. You should probably convert everything to 1080i DVCProHD. You will not lose the progressive look. You will have to make sure the edit system is capable of DVCProHD with a HD video card and RAID array. It might seem expensve to upgrade but you will save time, especially if you are color-correcting and adding effects.

1. Capture HDV footage via HDVxDV or Lumiere HDV. Convert footage to DVCProHD.

2. Edit in real-time.

3. Convert finished edit to DVCPro for SD delivery such as DigiBeta or DVCam.

4. Try to save an HD copy of the edit. Converting back to HDV is not recommended but you can do it if there is no other option. You can also make a data file copy of the finished timeline with "QuickTime Export" and save that to an external FireWire drive. This might get expensive depending how big the files gets.

5. Export mpeg2 files for DVD in SD 16x9 anamorphic and HD.

Thanks guys,

This has cleared up a couple of questions and raised a few more regarding our systems capabilities.

I will let you know how this works out....