Hello dear and knowledgeable community!

As a photographer, I'm very new at this. I have an HC3 and just acquired PPro2 for a good price.

I want to edit my HDV footage (preferably using a HD intermediate w/o interframe compression) and produce two kinds of output for my movies:
1) DVD for viewing now, and 2) some HD archival format for later output on whatever HD medium I will use in the future.

I mistakenly thought the CineForm Codec was included in PPro2, and now discovered that one has to buy Aspect HD in order to get the codec (right?). Since my budget can't handle the extra 500$ for the time being, I'm looking for alternatives.

Having spent many hours searching on the web, it seems to me that there should be a way to do the work with all the wonderful free software and codecs that are around (VirtualDub, AviSynth, ffdshow, HuffYuv, ffv1, ...).

Thus my question: could somebody guide me towards a good workflow, given that

- I would like to do the main editing work in PPro2
- I prefer to work on a format with only intra-frame compression
- I want to preserve the highest possible quality in view of future HD-output
- I'm ready to use free tools, even if cumbersome

And the additional questions:
- Is the CineForm codec really not available outside of Aspect?
- Rather than archiving a huge intermediate HD file, could there possibly be a way to store one or several script files which could at any time reproduce all my editing (in PPro2, as well as in VirtualDub, etc.) on the source files?
- Is Nero 7 an appropriate tool for DVD encoding? I heard that PPro2 doesn't do a very good job.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but the answers change daily in this fast moving world...
You can also simply redirect me to whatever threads handle this.

Many thanks and kind regards,
Louis

Premiere Pro 1.51 actually used the Cineform as part of its capture codec. So if you have access to that, you can actually use. Aspect adds added abilities, and an updated codec, from what I understand.

HD Connect is a program to capture in the Codec. It is usually used in conjunction with Vegas- whethe 6 or 7. Vegas 7 does edit in native HDV too.

I edit with Premeire Pro 2.0, in "native HDV". It works well in most respects. However, I do not do a lot of renendering or heavy color correction--- if you are in that league, you may have to bit the bullet...

I find I have better luck with converting footage in HDV to DV from the camera, if my project is destined for DVD. Anecdotal, only because I could be missing a setting somewhere.

Finally gave it a try this weekend but HDV->Cineform HD AVI->virtual dub (resizing)->tmpgenc (for dvd mpeg 2 compression) does a much better job then using the standard def conversion in the camera.

Look into it if u want to get hte most out of your dvds from hdv.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=70792

Thanks Chris!

I do have PPro1.5. Is there a way I could get the CF codec out of there and install it in PPro2? (I don't have 1.5 installed right now.)

Louis