How to combine XL H1 with XL2 for SD DVD?
 

We are going to shoot a big band in a church with our XL H1.
Now the idea comes up to improve the video by also using an available XL2 to make a dual cam shoot.
The goal is to preserve this "100-years celebration" quite a while and at the same moment sell some DVD:s in SD with good sound.

What workflow would you suggest? How is the XL2 best matched to XL H1 footage? By uprezing the XL2 footage and then downrez to SD? Or by downrezing the XL H1 footage and edit everything in SD. Or just shoot SD with both cameras. We are using the latest FCP and will shoot 25F.

Or should we rent another XL H1?

Thankful for any ideas what could improve this. /Johan

How are you capturing your footage - camera or deck? I have intercut footage from both cameras using a Sony M10 and down converting with the deck... They match pretty well as long as you are careful about setting up the scene files in both cameras...

I have also captured both native (ie SD and HDV) and converted the SD to HDV in the timeline... This works well if the majority of the footage is HDV and you want to work in the HDV timeline so you have it as a backup...

I can't help with FCP.

In Vegas, I would just put each camera's footage on the timeline, edit normally, and then render to SD. The HD footage will be downconverted to SD. I have not tried this, but it is my understanding that this will work.

If this is important, and it seems like it is, I would rent another XL H1. If this is out of your budget, then practice with both cameras beforehand and practice the editing and rendering. Then you will know if the results will be acceptable before the actual shoot.

Hi Steve and Dan,
Thank you for your answers. I use our XL H1 for capture. Have no deck. Can I use it to play the XL2 footage for ingest to FCP?

Most of the video will probably come from the H1 with cuts from the XL2 while the H1 is changing position, zooming or framing.

I prefer if the timeline is HDV if the result is acceptable for the SD DVD.

Will anybody from the street (not you) immediately see that the picture is coming from another source and react negatively?

The closest place I have found a rental XL H1 is in Stockholm (thanks Jonas Nyström).
They would like me to came to their facility for first time rental to set up the account and identify me. Thats a journey of 1100 km. Costs too much time and money in my opinion.
Anybody who knows a rental H1 in Denmark/Copenhagen? That is much closer.

We go to Denmark when we need to go to a "big" city. Actually our part of the land once in a while belonged to Denmark so we find it quite comfortable there. Climate is better too.

Thanks for your help! / Johan

Yes, you can use the XL H1 to capture SD footage from the XL2.

To do this, first set the camera to SD mode in the menu, then connect the Firewire cable. Once the Firewire cable is plugged in, you can not change the mode via the menu.

I have not tried mixing footage, but I feel that it will work for you. Other opinions may vary. I would trust the opinions of someone who has actually tried it. The XL H1 makes very good SD footage, but so does the XL2.

I also recommend importing the HDV footage as HD and not downconverting it during capture. This gives you more options, such as panning and cropping while maintaining good quality.

Johan, I've noticed that if you have XL2 25P PAL (custom preset VDETAIL set to NORMAL) footages and combine those with XL H1 25F PAL footages, the XL2 image appears sharper than the XL H1 downrez SD image. (Probably, the guys in the NTSC world will not see the same effect.) It's difficult to say whether this will bother you, but maybe it's a worth the effort to test to set VDETAIL to LOW in XL2.

In addition, in my experience matching the colors of the two is not that easy, if you downconvert the XL H1 images first to DV format. For, it seems there is a change in colors (some richness of colors is lost) in the conversion to DV. So, I would rather edit in HD using a monitor window of size 50%, make everything to match there, and then convert the whole timeline directly to a DVD SD mpeg2-file.