HV20 and Blackmagic Card
 

I am still trying to figure out what my post workflow will be. Has anyone shot on a A1 and used the hv20's HDMI out to a Blackmagic Intensity card to capture HD? Just wondered how well that worked.

I am not sure if I want to go with Blackmagic or cineform's Aspect HD and capture via firewire.

The first time I was using the HDMi output and choosing the cineform codec,
Later I noticed that using the hdmi I was just increasing the size of the video files a lot and not having any big difference in the image quality.
I would say that that keeping the firewire method is good for the cature in 1440 x 1080. Remenber that the A1 is an 8 bit camera with 1440x1080 res. I would say that if you do 1920 x 1080 footage then your hv20 hdmi output makes more sence.
The black magic codec is great quality also but for me is not that easy to handle at the time of editing vs cineform.
I will recommend you to try both cause sometimes image quality for me and for some other people is a different point of view.

Thanks for your thoughts. I might just go with cineform then. How do you monitor your HD signal? Do you use the intensity card for monitoring?

From what I know it gives ability to capture 4:2:2 real time over HDMI and edit in ProRes in FCP, which is much better than HDV, faster renders etc.
I'm just peaking mine this week. Ordered 2 weeks ago and didn't have time to pick it up yet. I will post when I test it. Can't wait to see the difference.

There is a significant quality improvement using the Intensity card with CineForm over the Blackmagic M-JPEG or the camera's native MPEG2, the issue is shooting via HMDI (connected to a computer) vs the convenience of shooting to tape. For greenscreen work use Aspect HD (or Prospect/NEO HD) via the Intensity card, however the quality gains may out over take the ease of using tape for general shooting.

re: "Later I noticed that using the hdmi I was just increasing the size of the video files"

There is lot more information in the HDMI source data, 4:2:2 vs 4:2:0 and all the high detail (and sensor noise -- good for dithering) that is lost after MPEG compression. Yes, data rates will be high from HDMI, and that is an indicator of a good thing.