I am getting into HDV several months earlier than I would like dues to my SD Cams taking a dive. So Ive replaced them with a pair of Canon XH A1's.

I still need to purchase a new PC to handle the hdv better, Purchase Aspect HD and define my workflow. Below is what I think is the best workflow for me after much research.

Id appreciate a sanity check here, and I do have questions in the archiving area.

My desire is to shoot HDV, edit in PPRO in HD aspect (via cineform) and output SD 16:9 DVDs. I want to be able to reload the same project in the future and export HD Blue Ray DVDs.

Workflow:

1. Shoot in HDV
2. Capture into PPRO to Aspect HD cinform codec
3. Edit in PPRO
4. Export to cinform avi to 720x480 (16:9)that Encore will accept directly and encode to SD DVD
4b. In the future, export the same project to cineform hd size avi that Encore can accept directly to burn Blueray DVD
5. Archive: To Disk or Tape? Export to HDV seems crazy cause of the compression loss. Export to Disk sounds good; but I roll a lot of tape, and I dont like the idea of stacks of harddrives on my shelves. The other challenge is time. If I had saved projects I did 5 years ago onto disk and tried to reload them today, I couldn't. I no longer have the archaic DV Raptor card and proprietary codec! But the old dvcam tapes i archived onto work flawlessly.

What is everyone's strategy for archiving HD or HDV projects? Output to tape in an uncompressed form perhaps?

Appreciate some wisdom.

Curt

1. Yes, shoot in HD
2. Use Cineform HDLink for the capture and the program will give you the option of AVI or AVI plus M2T. Go the later, AVI for editing and M2T for
your archive.
3. Edit in PP pro
4. Export the SD to Encore for SD DVD and you can also export the edited footage out as M2T. This way you'll end up with the original M2T and the edited M2T plus the SD AVI for distribution on DVD.
5. Archive? I like tape, but I would take my projects and export to tape and
save to an external drive. I was just over at Fry's Electronics and you can get 500GB external USB drives for $170

Re-encoding and exporting back to tape and then capturing again will be lossy. I would archive the PPRO project and delete the original and the preview files after my SD DVD is done. Later I would capture the tape again and reload the project, export as HD.