FCP for HDV Feature Films
 

How practical is FCP for editing HDV for feature films? Does it "quit" (I'd call it crash) with complex HDV editing? Is it advisable to convert the footage to perhaps the ProRes codec?

I presently use Premiere Pro CS3 which, in retrospect, I should have at least used an intermediate codec, if not change to FCP, for such a large project.

Any advice from people who edited an HDV feature film in Premiere Pro and changed to Final Cut Pro would be greatly appreciated.

Our Film
 

We are editing our feature entirely in FCP and it is working great. I'm from an Avid background and was scared about FCP's media management, as OMF format is far superior (IMHO).

To address your question, indeed, we converted all of our footage from HDV to 1280x720 ProRes 422 (non-HQ). Our array is a 1.2TB LVD 320 SCSI hooked to an PCIe ATTO with a new 8-core and this baby cooks! We can render out effects astonishingly fast the software is stable. Our editor, although talented, gets lazy at points and sometimes works in the wrong project in FCP (a common error easier in FCP that other apps - IMHO) and media is always everywhere - but barring these annoyances - FCP is a sure winner. I can't speak for CS3 but it leaves Avid behind in its ease of use.

For media management, online/offline workflow, keyboard layout - Avid wins and still should be considered for editing a feature.

Hope this helps,
-C

I am nowhere as advanced as other users, however I have had experience with using FCP and Adobe PPro. I had numerous crashe and "hiccups" with PPro and got so fed up with the instability that I jumped ship and adopted the Final Cut suite of apps for all my video work. FCP runs very smoothly and I would definitely have confidence in its ability to handle the scope of a feature length project.
-Steve

My workflow for HDV (from a V1U) is into ProRes HQ and it is rock solid with FCP. You should have no problems wiht full length features - most of my stuff is 60 to 90 minutes.
ProRes works nicely with Motion and Color with very fast render times. ProRes is the preferred workflow for Matrox and BlackMagic, so it is well supported.