Exporting HDV to tape
 

After shooting and editing a test sequence at 1080i, I presumed exporting to a Mini-DV tape would be much like DV: Either "export to tape" and have Premiere automatically control the camera, or play the timeline & manually record on the camera.

But instead, the timeline goes through a rather slow "Render and Record" sequence before automatically exporting to tape, and it apparently can not be done manually. Can anyone explain what "rendering" is actually taking place, and is there any easier/faster way to simply record the edited timeline to tape.

Thanks very much.

Paul Budline

The way DV and HDV record to tape is completely different. Where DV compressed each individual frame by throwing away a lot of color information (4:1:1) but keeping each frame "independent", HDV uses temporal compression. Temporal compression stores one frame at the beginning of a GOP (Group Of Pictures) and then calculates each subsequent frame as a different from the previous one. At the end of the GOP, typically 6 frames, the process is started over. That why you should never store to HDV previously captured footage, even by using the same format you end up transcoding the heck out of it and adding a generation loss. This is also why it takes so much longer to render an HDV sequence.