question about shooting HDV on the Z1 for SD broadcast

[Luca F Lucarini]

ey guys, i'm a bit of a newb when it comes to HDV so please bear with me on this one...

I'm shooting a music video with the Z1 in a couple of weeks. The video is going to be shown on SD television, and they master has to be delivered on a mini-DV tape.

At what point should should I downconvert to SD? One problem I have is that I'm running an older powerbook G4 for editing (1ghz/768 MB RAM/FCP 4.5 HD) so I reckon my ability to natively edit HDV footage on my setup is nil. I'm confused as to whethere I should:

1. Shoot everything DV and proceed from there?
2. Shoot HDV and then just capture the material into final cut as DV?

If anyone had a tip or two I would appreciate it. I guess the bottom line is if the material is going to end up as SD am I just making things more difficult for myself by shooting HDV? Or will I notice more quality if I shoot at HDV and then capture as regular DV? Or is there a better way to do this? Sorry to the mods if this is in the wrong section.

[Vincent Rozenberg]

My 2 cents:

Shoot HDV, edit HDV and do your post-fx in a 8 or 10 bit timeline. Then convert everything down to a DV timeline to put on tape. You will be stunned about the quality you will get this way. I'm recommending you to go the HDV/Uncompressed way because then you will be the nicest to your material in terms of effects, colour grading etc. I've used to edit HDV on a 1.33 ghz Powerbook and it works fine, just render once in a while to a DVD or something if you wanna view your results on a TV. You do have to update FCP to 5.0 for proper editing in HDV though.

[Vincent Rozenberg]

Oh, and just to complete, If you do it like this, you always have a nice uncompressed master incase a broadcaster is asking you one..

[Luca F Lucarini]

that's interesting that you were able to edit HDV on your setup. people have told me i'm dreaming for thinking I can do the job on my ageing lappy;). How much RAM did you have?

[Vincent Rozenberg]

Just 768 of RAM. It was a sort of Wild wild west edit adventure.. because of circumstances I had to capture al my HDV material on location (20 hours+ of material) with this laptop and a Lacie HD via USB2 (!!). But it worked out perfectly!

[Luca F Lucarini]

that sounds like a crazy time :)

thanks for the tips man.

[Joe Lumbroso]

I hope I'm not hi-jackin' this thread but here's how I dealt with low computing power and editing HDV footage. Behold, an excerpt from my um.. "journal":

Originally Posted by me

Editing this video made my poor 1.33ghz/1gb ram Powerbook want to cry (he was too manly to actually break down and do it). The footage was shot at 1080i which is 1440x1080 making for a heck of a lot of pixels which increases the amount of HD space and memory used for previews/rendering. I really need a more powerful Mac for editing but I had use what I have. Here is what I did. I captured the footage at 428x240 (you can use 320x240 for 4:3 ratio) then cut a 'rough edit' with the smaller, lighter files. Once I had my timeline laid out and effects and transitions in place, I quit FCP and deleted all the capture/media files (there's probably a better/proper way to do this). Then reconnected the camera, opened FCP and re-captured the media in full 1440x1080 resolution. Now my slaptop was behaving sluggish but the hard part was done, I only had to make a couple very slight adjustments before rendering out the final video which you see above.

[Steve Mullen]

Originally Posted by Vincent Rozenberg

... just render once in a while to a DVD or something if you wanna view your results on a TV.

An alternative if you are going to be producing in HD is to purchase a low cost high quality HDTV. Have it ISF calibrated.

Now you can feed it DVI from from most newer computers. Or, feed it analog component from a Kona or AJA board.

While the option of uncompressed is a good one -- you will need to invest a lot of money in a RAID. The cheapest solution is edit native HDV.