Bless this board. My HDV workflow 1

Question

As I edited my 88-minute documentary over the last two months using FCP 5.0.2, I pored over the pages of this board several times a day. I was looking for tips, workarounds, and collective wisdom. For I had foolhardedly decided to edit the piece in native HDV.
Well this community got me through that painful ordeal. So I want to share what worked for me. For the most part, it's merely a synthesis of what better minds here have come up with. But I know there's a real need for a solid discussion about how to work with HDV. So I thought maybe someone might benefit from my experience.
1. WHY HDV?
- I was in the market for a new camera. I wanted to try 1080i. Sony was the only real, affordable player at the time. So I went for the Z1 (I'm a PD-150 afficianado).
2. WHY EDIT HDV?
- Until this documentary, I had downconverted everything when capturing. And it looked great. It certainly is the easier way to go. Especially if you KNOW you're going to broadcast and will have a post-production house get everything in order.
- But this time, with FCP 5.0 available, I wanted to try native HDV editing. Also, I wanted the ability to show the finished product in HDV via G5/camera output to an HD monitor or projector before finalizing for broadcast.
- Doing so also allowed me to order up 1080i graphics and see how they fit in the finished product.
- Some of the film festivals are now requiring HDCAM masters, so if I had to do things 'on the cheap,' I thought I can at least do a quick and dirty dub from HDV tape/camera to HDCAM tape.
3. EQUIPMENT
- No question, using a dual G5 made a huge difference in real time editing. Powerbook editing worked, but was a little sluggish and didn't allow me to see much in real time.
- I used Cinema Display for monitoring, which is a real cheat. There's no way I would use that for color correction though. I'm hoping to have SDI/Blackmagic etc. for my next project.
- I started out with 2 500 GB Lacie firewire drives to capture my 70 hours of footage. But they proved to be really unstable. So as soon as I had logged everything, I subclipped everything I needed and used Media Manager to copy them to a 2nd internal SATA drive. Much more efficient, much safer.
4. MIXING RESOLUTIONS ON THE SAME TIMELINE
- 20% of my footage was shot with a Sony TRV-900 camera with anamorphic adapter for true 16:9. I originally brought those SD clips into my HDV timeline. Requiring a render, and a resize each time.
- Thanks to this board, I discovered it was much easier to batch compress all my SD subclips in Compressor to uprez them to HDV. Worked like a charm in the HDV timeline afterwards.
- 1440x1080, 72 DPI for importing still images into an HDV timeline. Same thing for sequential images (animation).
5. EDITING HDV
- Fabulous and painless.
...continued...

Answer 1

6. BURNING HDV TO SD DVD
- It was always best to export the timeline to a self-contained Quicktime movie using "Current Settings." Much quicker than exporting directly from FCP to Compressor.
- iDVD's downconversion of an HDV Quicktime file was awful, with blocky artifacts etc.
- Using Compressor or Quicktime to downrez the HDV Quicktime file to SD, and then burning in iDVD was better. But it appeared dull, the titles looked pixellated, and I got that deinterlaced "film look" without really trying.
- My BEST solution was to use Compressor to turn the HDV Quicktime file into an SD MPEG2 file for DVDSP. But my G5 kept crashing (darkened screen, "reboot" message in several languages) a couple of hours into the compression. It was only after I used Disk Warrior on my system drive that it finally worked. I've heard that G5 memory is finicky as well, but I ran MEMTEST several times without a hitch. It doesn't help that my Quicktime file is 16 GB.
- Thanks to this board, I came across the best custom Compressor setting for HDV to SD for DVDSP. Because I'm dealing with an 88 minute feature plus 7-minute trailer for a single-sided DVD, this is what I did:
DVD: Best Quality 120 minutes – 16:9. Use the Inspector to modify settings:
- VIDEO FORMAT tab – Field Dominance: Bottom First
- QUALITY tab – One Pass (NO VBR), Average Bit Rate 7.0, Best Motion Estimation
- GOP tab – GOP Structure: "IP"
- FRAME CONTROLS – "Off"
- FILTERS – Check "Deinterlacing" select "Blur"; Check "Sharpen Edge" Amount "10"
Importing this asset into DVDSP, I used the MPEG2 file along with the smaller Dolby AC-3 file, discarding the larger AIFF sound file.
7. PRINT TO VIDEO
- This is the real hangup for me. I can't do it back to my Z1. It always stutters about 8 minutes into the piece.
- ScottSV from this board ( Scott SV, "FCP5 & Sony HDR-HC1 HDV Cam - Print to Video?" #1, 04:16pm Sep 17, 2005 CDT) suggested outputting the sequence to a Quicktime AIC file (custom settings 1920 x 1080, 60 FPS, top field dominant), then importing that new file into iMovie, then exporting to camera. It's a long process but it worked for me on a much smaller file. But you need tons of hard drive space and patience, and iMovie just quit on me when I tried with a 44-minute chunk of my documentary. I may go out and buy another large hard drive and try it again.
- Avid has just come out with its HDV plug-in for XPress Pro. But it only works with MT2 transport files, which are also huge. I've always had much more success with Avid when printing back to tape than with FCP. Even with SD. That said, I enjoy using FCP a whole lot more.
- I've heard that Apple is working on this HDV print-to-video issue. I hope they come up with a solution soon.
Feel free to check out the H.264 version of my movie trailer for "Independent America" at http://www.hrhmedia.com/page13/page14/page14.html. It's a fabulous codec, but as you can see, still not a flawless conversion of the original HDV file.
Hope this really long posting will be helpful to others. Special thanks to Scott SV, Max Average, Waymen, David Bogie and countless others for helping me get this project done through their feedback to this community.