Have recently been researching various Avid Xpress Pro HDV workflows and while there are no shortage of opinions on the best method of handling HDV in the Avid environment, some questions related to the nuts and bolts of practical editing of HDV in Avid seem always to go unanswered in other forums.

My questions for the boffins among the readership are:

1) Avid claims that transcoding captured HDV footage using the DNxHD codec maintains integrity of picture quality across several 'generations' i.e. video mixdowns, multi-layered effects et al; and that when a timeline is archived back out to HDV tape, image quality is not degraded in comparison to original footage. Is this true or merely company hype?

2) If any among the readership are successfully editing in the HD domain in Avid Xpress Pro (latest version running under Windows XP Professional SP2), what are the specifications of your system with regard to CPU, RAM and graphics card?

3) what format do you archive to in HD? i.e. tape? HDD (if so what file format, m2t? AVI? WMV HD?)? Data DVD or Data BluRay?

Any help greatly appreciated.

cheers.

DNxHD uses 4:2:2 Color Sampling while HDV uses 4:2:0. Even though no information is gained in the transcode, the DNxHD will hold up better upon rendering and generation loss.

I use a Powerbook G4, 1.33GHZ, 2 Gigs of Ram.

3) what format do you archive to in HD? i.e. tape? HDD (if so what file format, m2t? AVI? WMV HD?)? Data DVD or Data BluRay?

I've been mastering back to tape using the "Export to HDV Device" command. Since you can use the option that also saves the resulting m2t file, I've been archiving that by burning that file to CD/DVD.

Steve & Jiri, thanks for taking the time to help.

Here's a link to the Avid Xpress Pro System Requirements:
http://www.avid.com/products/xpresspro/specs.asp

Its best not to deviate from the avid specs unless you have a lot of free time on your hands.

We've been putting in 4 gig of ram minimum in recent builds.