help picking the right cineform workflow

[Adam Mendelson]

I am in a transitional / experimental phase trying to improve and pick the right work flow for myself and my setup. So a bit about me and my equipment and then hopefully some of the guru’s here can get me pointed in the right direction. I shoot 1080i HDV with a Sony HDR-HC1 and have been using Cineform’s HDLink and more recently the new NEO HDV to capture in AVI for use in Sony Vegas. I shoot manly home movies and some sailing racing and cruising footage. I am a hobbyist who likes to get the most out of this and really enjoy the fine art of editing. The bug is getting more serious as I am really excelling in Vegas.

I have noticed a clear difference working in this AVI format as opposed to the native M2T and am convinced that a good intermediate format such as this is the best choice for quality preservation.

I have since purchased Adobe Premiere CS3 with After Effects to get a better side by side compare in workflows and possibilities. I am committed to the PC platform for a wide host of reasons so let’s not start a Mac FCP thing here, of course I would love to have that to try as well. Hell one day I just may.

What intermediate Cineform codec should I use for the best cross-platform portability? Will the NEO HDV in AVI or MOV be adequate? Now that I am going to play with Premiere and After Effects should I be looking at the Prospect lineup? If so what is the deal between 2K and the new 4K beta?

Back to HDlink for now:
what are the prime settings I should use to capture the highest quality 1080i and move to 720p via Cineframe? I do believe this is possible based on my reading yes?

Thanks in Advance for all the help.
Adam

[Mike McCarthy]

Shooting HDV and editing in PPro, you will probably get the best bang for your buck with AspectHD. This will give you all of the NeoHDV functionality for Capture and Vegas, as well as accelerated Cineform performance in PPro CS3. I would stay with AVI for all PC work, and only rewrap to MOV if you need to work on OSX.

The next step would allow full 1920 frame size with ProspectHD or NeoHD, but for stuff shot with the HC1, a Cineform 8bit 1440x1080 file will easily hold all of the data that camera can shoot.

The 2K and 4K versions are probably not relevant to your workflow as they are designed for filmscans or RedOne and SI2K digital cinematography workflows.