Mode for SD footage?
 

Just curious.

Everything I shoot on my A-1, I do so in HD and downconvert to SD.

Is anyone shooting in SD? Is there any advantage in shooting in SD if that is going to be the final product?

Thanks.

Roger,
I'm shooting in SD for our local Cable company and the Fox station here. I'm not editing in either case and they can only accept SD in MiniDV, so that's how I shoot it.
Bill

Bill,

Thanks for the info.

Just curious.

Rog Lee

Yes, I supply weekly footage for a regional tv station.

They're happy with SD so I shoot in SD and just send in the tape for them to edit. Saves extra work at my end. Quality's fine.

Occasionaly I'll do an edit (low light etc) but not often.

Here are the guidelines I live by:

- If I'm keeping the tape: Shoot HDV
- If I'm giving the tape away and the footage will be boring: Shoot SD
- If I'm giving the tape away and the footage might be interesting: Shoot HDV and give them an SD dub.

I rarely give away tapes and am quite reticent to do it. Maybe my ego's too big, but I want to keep everything I shoot. I also never know then I might need to use the footage from the tiddly-winks contest I shot last month might be useful in a future production.

Tape's cheap. My time isn't.

I shoot everything in HD unless I'm shooting for the news, in which case they prefer 16:9 DV. I usually give them the tape after I uplink via satellite and they don't have HDV equipment to view it on, hence the SD.
But if I could I would shoot everything in HD.

I was actually going to make a new thread about something along these lines when I saw this thread. I publish most of my shots to DVD, so which mode should I be shooting in? I have been shooting in HDV and just downconverting in post, but would I be better off just shooting in SD? Any thoughts and comments would be appreciated.

I shoot everything HDV, 24F, capture in HDV1080P24 mode, edit in 23.98 timeline, then export the finished show in whatever is needed. Works for me. But if there's no need for you to have the original footage to crank out an HD program later on as HD becomes more distributable, then shooting SD should be fine.

Because I'm doing this every week I always have 5 or 6 tapes in the loop. Each segment I submit is anywhere from 5 to 6 minutes of footage (to be edited down to about 1 minute) so the tapes rotate back to me after downloading in the studio.

Each tape lasts me about 2 months and then is shelved for posterity.

Interesting.

Thanks all.