PPro 2 .0 Export to Tape...unintuitive design?
 

Thank god for this forum, because for the life of me I can't figure out how to post a thread on Adobe's forum. heh.

Okay my question is this. I've been editing a lot of HDV projects recently cause I finally have a way to watch them in high def on my TV (I bought a V1U so now I have a deck that I can use for all that footage I've been shooting for about a year now).

Here's what I find frustrating. All my effects and such are all rendered but when I go to export my project to tape it needs to go through another final rendering which I can't do in advance it seems.

Thing is, if I'm exporting an hours worth of material to tape it could take hours for it to go through this render and record stage and I have to leave my camcorder on that entire time. I don't really want to do that if I can avoid it.

Am I overlooking something basic? Is there not a way I can render everything completely so that when it's ready to record it starts printing to the tape right away? It at LEAST would've been something if Adobe had some sort of dialog box pop up saying "Render complete, turn on camcorder and proceed when ready to record."

Craig:

I understand your concerns, and certainly have experienced the same thing. However, I think the issue here is the HDV format itself. As I understand it HDV is peculiar to tape !! In other words, even though we render a file completely out to a final .m2t file, that file differs from what is going back on the tape. Thus, Premiere, in order to get it back to tape, has to do a further render. This is different than DV, which apparently is the same as what is on the tape.

This is also the reason, by my own reckoning, that we can't monitor our high def editing back out through firewire.

Yeah I guess it's not a huge deal that it needs to re-render itself in a peculiar way (just an annoyance I guess).

But I really do hope that in the next version of Premiere Pro that it will at least have a way to break down the "render and record" process into 2 steps so that I don't have to leave my camcorder on all night (on those longer projects) just waiting for the material to be able to export to tape.

It's not an intrinsic limitation of HDV. If a .m2t file has been rendered to precisely the correct format one can take a tiny 'export to tape' program like WriteDVHS and send it back to a camera via firewire.

So Graham, what is that correct format ???

Well that's the $100 question! There was a post a while back where a guy had (finally) figured out how to export to tape from Linux, and he had a lengthly list of specs for the mpeg. (He wasn't using Premiere's encoder though so it doesn't get us where we need to be). I'll try and find that post...

EDIT: See the final post in this thread: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=76674