What's the FASTEST way to capture, edit & export HDV to tape in CS3?
 

I have been using Cineform's Aspect HD plugin for a long time with Premiere Pro CS3 to capture, make simple edits and export the movies back to mini-DV tape as a finished HDV program as well as sometimes making intermediate AVIs to encode into web ready videos. All this footage is shot with my Sony FX-1. But this workflow has become far too slow for me with the initial conversion to Cineform AVI and then the transcoding back to HDV for the tape. Unlike many of you, what I really need is simple speed since I generally only do very simple edits and no compositing or color corrections and since I capture, edit and export movies on an almost a daily basis. I know Premiere Pro CS3 can capture and edit HDV footage natively and export to tape *on my system* but at this point I am not sure if it works only because I have both the older versions of Premiere as well as the Cineform Aspect HD plugin installed or it works for everyone with just CS3 installed on their system.


So if I want to avoid the conversion to Cineform and to capture with HDV Split (to enable scene detection which makes my edits go much faster) and then simply edit native MPEG-2 on my system and then export the barely edited movie back to mini-DV tape AS HDV for a client what is my fastest method available? I want to avoid all conversions or rendering wherever possible. Just need to deinterlace. But HDV Split cannot deinterlace upon capture! So now I have to right-click on each clip on the timeline and deinterlace in the Fields options! Another hassle! Is there any fast simple way to capture with scene detect, deinterlace, edit and export back to tape without transcoding back to HDV? Because with this workflow, I think it is as slow as when I was using the Cineform plugin!

Matrox's RTx2 card is designed to ACCELERATE HDV editing and exporting. I am not sure if it will offer you a way of batch deinterlacing without doing it to each clip in Premiere though. Not sure about laying back to an HDV camera with Matrox, never tried it. HDV is too lossy to compress to more than once (at acquisition) for the projects I work on.

I used to do the de-interlacing upon capture with HDLink and immediately encoded to Cineform AVI codec using Aspect HD. Exporting from native HDV on the Premiere Pro timeline is introducing a whole new set of problems for me all day today including forcing me to add some black video at the beginning and ends of my sequences so that they can cleanly fade in and out to black at the beginning and end of the program. Used to work smoothly when I was using Cineform- not anymore.

If you intend to deinterlace, then aren't you are stuck with re-rendering 100% of your footage?

It will need to happen either while you capture (as was the case when you were using Cineform) or when you render out the final project (as would be the case if you start editing raw m2t footage in Premiere).

You are right- I used to deinterlace (and convert to AVI) upon capture with Cineform's HDLink app. It was much more convenient that way since it could handle scene detect and deinterlace in the capture step! Premiere Pro CS3 still can't do scene detect when capturing at all; HDLink cannot scene detect when capturing only the m2t's apparently and HDVSplit cannot do deinterlacing at all! So if I cannot both deinterlace and have scene detect for my footage it is a major hassle and slows down my edits. Since I send many of my clients HDV edited movies on mini-DV tapes (that they encode to use online) nowadays I am stuck deinterlacing on the timeline or not having scene detect if I edit m2t's. I thought I was going to save time by skipping the conversion to AVI, but giving up Cineform has only wasted my time unfortunately.