Hi, I am currently finalizing a short film of mine and plan on submitting it to various film festivals.

I was wondering if any of you had any suggestions as to what format works well with the HVX footage. A film transfer is pretty much out of the question as the expense is too high. I was wondering about formats such as HDCAM, BETA, etc -
formats that are the norm at Film Festivals.

The film was shot in 720p if that helps.

Thanks guys.

The most important thing is to export it as uncompressed. Although you shot and edited in a compressed codec if you then export it out in the same codec it will be re-compressed again and you'll lose quite a bit of color and detail.

Any 4:4:4 uncompressed format will do well.

This all depends upon the format in which the festival wants the footage. If the festival will accept DVCPRO HD footage, just output via firewire to a Panasonic deck.

You are not indicating which NLE and platform you are using, but on the Mac, if you have a Kona 3, you can do a real time uprez to HDCAM and record directly to HDCAM deck. Or, send it to a post house that has that capability. It really should not be terribly expensive (certainly only a fraction of film transfer).

But the question is what the festivals want.

Ned Soltz

Some festivals have started using the pseudo HD players
like Buffalo, i/o data etc.....
You can playback either WMV HD or a transport stream....
We just created some 1920x1080 transport streams for
a universities visitor center. The footage looks great on
50" plasmas and they have one feed going to a projector
showing on a 10' screen.....
The JVC i/o data player only costs $385, much cheaper
than even renting an HDCAM deck for one day.

Thanks for the responses guys, you've been helpful.

"The most important thing is to export it as uncompressed. Although you shot and edited in a compressed codec if you then export it out in the same codec it will be re-compressed again and you'll lose quite a bit of color and detail.

Any 4:4:4 uncompressed format will do well."

Yeah, I'm beginning to notice that mistake. Initially the clips were compressed with Cineform HD, then QT, then I corrected everything in After Effects, then cut it all together in Premiere.

This is a dumb question but if you export a compressed clip with degraded quality as uncompressed, will the picture quality increase?