Help with: HDV to SD, HVR-V1U Workarounds

[Katie Mims]

Hi Everyone,

So, I've gotten myself into a bit of an editing mess. Forgive me if I sound confused or unclear about any of this; I'm still trying to wrap my head around everything. I could use any help and advice that anyone has!

So here's the deal.

I have two problems. Or, really, three. I shot footage with the Sony HVR-V1U in 24A and 30p (by accident. I swear it was set to 24A. Didn't figure this out until yesterday). The three problems are:

1) I messed up my workaround and need to figure out how to fix it
2) I have two frame rates, much to my dismay. 24A and 30p, all encoded in a HDV1080i60 stream.
3) Converting HDV to SD was horrifying yesterday. Cadence problems, interlacing, flickering, noise and TERRIBLE quality.

Just so that everyone knows right off, I have a delivery date of July 9th and it needs to be delivered in SD (DVD) for projection on big screen. Eventually it also needs to be online.

So. Here we go.

1) I messed up my workaround and need to figure out how to fix it

Using information in this thread: <a href="http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=83651">DVInfo</a>

And this thread: <a href="http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=87189">DvInfo Again</a>

I decided to use this workaround: <a href="http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/articles/camcorders/FCP_24P_HVRV1U.htm"> V1U Workaround</a>

I captured HDV 1080i60
Edited in a 1080i60 timeline

Went to finish the workaround by:
-Creating new sequence set to Photo-JPG 75%
-Paste project into new sequence, render, export, open in CinemaTools and Reverse Telecine

And I realized that I had to reverse the INDIVIDUAL clips, not the project. One good thing (I think) is that the footage is 24A, so the A frame should be the very first frame of every clip. Unfortunately I tried reversing a few clips and they looked very odd.

So to fix this do I go in and reverse all the clips I'm using individually, then reconnect my media to those new files? If so, what timeline do I do this in?

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2) I have two frame rates, much to my dismay. 24A and 30p, all encoded in a HDV1080i60 stream.

How do I safely mix these? I'm lost here. I've never mixed frame rates, and this is my first time working with HDV on top of the fact that FCP doesn't support this camera. Do convert one frame rate to the other? Or?

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3) Converting HDV to SD was horrifying yesterday. Cadence problems, interlacing, flickering, noise and TERRIBLE quality. I have a delivery date of July 9th, and to make sure I had something ready, I wanted to get a backup plan together, so yesterday I decided to just ignore the frame judder and try to just convert my current timeline (HDV1080i60) to SD.

To convert to SD I simply created a new timeline that was SD/DV/NTSC. Copy/pasted everything from the HDV timeline into it, rendered and took a look.

It was pretty terrible. The image quality was very poor, there was tons of noise/flickering in many of the clips, not to mention the obvious pulldown issues that were already there.

To fix the noise/flickering issues in the clips, a friend suggested that I export Uncompressed QT then create .Tiff files of each frame, import those into Shake and fix it in there. I'm not familiar with Shake, but my friend offered to show me how to do this.

One thing I totally didn't get was the fact that my 30p footage looked like it had interlacing problems when it shouldn't. My camera shoots progressive.

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Seriously. There has to be a better way to fix all these problems. I did some searching and found a few things.

This <a href="http://digitalcontentproducer.com/hdhdv/depth/edit_v1_final_cut_052907/index1.html">Workaround</a> for 24A.

Would re-capturing my used media as AIC and using the above workaround solve some of my problems? Any and all advice is appreciated.