What Format Should My Captured Video Be?

[Tim Rogers]

Im using Abobe Premiere and trying to capture the best quality from my FX1000 to author a BR Disc.
After i get the video captured in Premiere it shows that my video is compressed, is that the way it should be?
It shows that it is 1440x1080/60i(1.3333) 29.97.
I thought that the video needed to be uncompressed to have the best source file.
The reason im wondering this is because i burned a blu-ray disc last night of a video that was 55 minutes and the size was only 11.0 GB.

[Adam Gold]

HDV is by nature extremely highly compressed. The video characteristics displayed (1440x1080/60i(1.3333) 29.97) are the definition of the HDV format.

But no worries. It's more than enough to make brilliant Blu-Rays.

If you are doing a lot of color correction and other post production work, you might want to look at Cineform, which sort of "de-compresses" the video so you can run it through many re-encoding passes without losing too much quality. But for simple editing and effects it's fine to edit your HDV footage natively and you will still come up with brilliant discs.

[Aaron Holmes]

Hi there, Tim. The HDV video format used by the Z5 is highly-compressed MPEG-2, so that's what you get when you capture from the camera. About 12Gb/hour is what to expect. Unfortunately, while 1440x1080 and MPEG-2 are both natively supported by Blu-ray Disc, they are not supported together, which means that some amount of transcoding will always be required in order to put your footage on a proper Blu-ray. Depending one how much tweaking you plan to do in between capture and disc creation, you may wish to transcode to some lossless intermediate format after capture. If, however, your plan is simply to cut, add transitions, the odd title, etc., and then send straight to the disc, with Premiere/Encore, I suspect that would just be extra time spent for no gain in quality.

Best,
Aaron