Log and Capture Window for HDV

[Josh Keffer]

I recently acquired a Canon XHA1s and I'm loving it so far. They only problem I've encountered has been with capturing the footage to FCP.

I can't get the Log an Capture window to show up with this setup. When I choose Log and Capture it asks me to name the clip and then it basically goes into Capture Now mode.

I prefer to log all of my footage first, choose the clips that I want to capture, and then Batch Capture. The method that I've had to use so far with this setup is very cumbersome and with the large file sizes I'm working with, very heavy on the hard drive side of things.

I did a little searching here but the only advice I found so far was "create an Easy Setup" and I've already done that.

Here are the settings for my Easy Setup:

- Sequence Preset: Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) 1440x1080 30p 48 kHz

- Capture Preset: HDV-Apple ProRes 422 (HQ)

- Device Control Preset: HDV Firewire


I'm using FCS 2, by the way.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Josh

[Shaun Roemich]

If you capture HDV directly to ProRes, FCP behaves exactly as you say - like Capture Now.

If you change your capture settings to capture HDV material to the HDV codec, it will Log and Capture as normal.

[Josh Keffer]

That's what I was worried about. Might have to change up my workflow a bit. I don't really love the idea of having to render as a part of my capture process, though.

Thanks for your help, Shaun!

Josh

[William Hohauser]

You have the capture process for HDV a little misunderstood. HDV capture in FCP puts a QuickTime wrapper around the native HD mpeg transport stream that is coming out of the camera. It's a transparent process for the actual video signal so nothing is rendered. Test it out.

What you would like to do is change the HDV sequence settings by opening the render tab and changing the render codec to ProRes.

[Josh Keffer]

I should be more specific about the render I mentioned.. I edit in ProRes 422 HQ, so if I capture as HDV, I have to render the QT files to get them to the same codec as the sequence. That's all I meant by saying that I'd rather not have to render.

Thanks for the info though - I didn't know that's how it captured HDV.

[William Hohauser]

ProRes HQ might be a bit of overkill for HDV footage. Some people have recommended ProRes LT but I use standard ProRes 422 for my HDV projects. Especially for multi-cam switches. For straight forward editing with transitions and color correction, setting the sequence as HDV with ProRes rendering works just fine and reduces your hard drive space consumption by 60% versus full ProRes. You can successfully real-time edit HDV files brought into a ProRes sequence, it will just require a full render when finished.