EX1 to 50i

[Marcus Durham]

Hi,

I have an urgent need to provide a short clip of some footage I am shooting tomorrow as a 50i DVCAM file for download.

I'd prefer to use the EX1 to shoot this but alas it has no SD mode. I've done plenty of downconversions to SD as progressive, but not interlaced.

I'd assumed that shooting 720p at 50fps would give decent SD interlaced video but I've just spent the last hour banging my head against a brick wall. Asking Compressor to down convert using it's stock settings results in jagged edges and 25fps motion.

Over to you guys. Short of dragging out the Z1, what is the best format to shoot in and the easiest way to get EX1 footage to a 50i DVCAM MOV file? I have FCP Studio and Adobe CS5.5. So far tried both packages and even AE made a hash of it. I know it must be a setting somewhere.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[Zoran Vincic]

Do you have a CUDA compatible card to use with PPro?

If yes then forget Compressor and convert the footage from Premiere, it'll be fast and great quality (Lanczos resize algorithm, as good as it gets).

And yes, use 720 50p mode.

[Marcus Durham]

In the end I shot 1080p and downconverted it to DV 50i for the news broadcaster. They only needed a 10 second clip and doing the shoot in 720p would have caused issues for the main production. Obviously it's not proper interlaced footage but it still looks fine for what they will want. Not much motion etc.

I did experiments on my CUDA card on the edit suite but the clip for the broadcaster needed to be done in the field on my laptop so anything speedy was out of the question.

Thanks for the help. Seems to have worked out as the footage is low motion anyway and is only clips being done as a freebie for the broadcaster. I noticed the proper news crews turned up with ancient DVCAM kit so perhaps thats the way news broadcasters still work. Seeing the news cameraman loading his camera with tape seems so archaic now!

Cheers.