sony V1 and apple pro res capture in fcp6 (heavy stuff)
 

hi. Im trying to edit a documentary in fcp6 with the Sony V1. But only have A 300 gb hard disk and my hdv progressive rushes apple pro ress are too heavy, like 50 gigas per tape. I have 20 tapes!!!

there's another way to capture? other's settings that allowed me to edit in native hdv. or I'll have to down-convert to dv.

thanks for the help!!!

Sorry I can't help you, but I would like to know too! I am also shooting a documentary (not as big> only like 8-10 tapes of footage) and I was wondering if should setup my project as HDV 1080i60 or ProRes422 1080i60? What are the pros / cons for each?
Thanks!

Still getting up to speed on Final Cut myself, but I think the way to handle this in FC is to use the Offline Edit feature. It allows you to work with lower-res versions of your footage to conserve space, until you're ready to render. Then you only have to capture the footage you actually will use in the video. Check out this tutorial on the Apple website. It covers the Offline Edit in the 2nd half of the video.

If you really want to edit in HDV, perhaps you could do your basic edit in HDV then switch your master edit footage to ProRes when you're ready to color correct. Either that or breakdown the footage into smaller segments that can easily be loaded a small portion at a time onto your computer.

Wow,
Thanks Michael, but when I want to capture my high quality online footage (when the edit is complete), should I use HDV or ProRes for that?
Thanks again!

There's always the option of buying a couple of 700-1000 MB drives to handle all the footage in ProRes.

My understanding is - if you're only doing basic cuts and fades, HDV should work just fine. But if you're doing major color correcting, ProRes would be better. Well that's my understanding at least. Hopefully we'll have an expert chime in to confirm or deny.

A little info from Ken Stone's website - HDV and ProRes.

The one thing that struck me is that if you originally capture directly into ProRes - there is "no batch re-capture" available, the new ProRes files become your "originals". So you get a little more flexibility if you capture HDV first, then convert to ProRes as needed.

HDV should be fine. It's a lighter weight codec at around 4Mb (mega bytes) per second (similar to DV).

You can colour correct in this codec using FCP color correction or Color, but not massive changes.

ProRes 422 is a full colour (4:2:2) colour space codec that you can convert to on the fly with FCP but as you mentioned, has a larger hard disk footprint. Perceptually without colour corrections then ProRes 422 looks pretty much the same as HDV. Because it is a full frame codec and not a Long GOP (MPEG) codec then it actually places less stress on the processor than HDV.

Horses for Courses!

We've just edited an entire 90 min documentary with colour correction in HDV on a MacBook Pro laptop. Just fine. When we projected in theatrically onto a 75ft screen in a digital cinema (VUE) then it looked superb. Almost 3D and that was acquired on a Sony V1.

Hope this helps.

Capture in HDV. Change the sequence timeline to ProRes. The HDV files will play in the ProRes sequence and the only ProRes video files you'll have are the renders of any effects or filters you do. These renders will be better then rendering effects in HDV. The final sequence can be outputted to a ProRes movie depending on how your final edit is being distributed.

William:
is there a difference between 1. putting the HDV into a pro res sequence or 2. changing the HDV sequence render settings to pro res?
just curious about respective differences or advantages...
and i remember reading on this site that it is best to capture/edit in the native HDV, rather than ummm transcode. i also vaguely remember doing a comparison between HDV and HDV>pro res, zooming in, and the pro res was worse off from the compression. or maybe my brain was worse off from compression.. can't remember... where am i? zzzzzzz....

ProRes is better if you use a capture board when coming from HDV originals. At least that's my impression. Capturing in HDV and setting the renders to ProRes is a curious workflow and deserves some research. I do a lot of multi-cam work and HDV sequences are a little overwhelmed by multi-cam especially if you do crazy things like mix HDV codecs. ProRes sequences don't care what QuickTime format you drop in.

I find that the ProRes sequence plays more filters and effects back in real time with HDV footage than an HDV sequence does with the same footage. I'm working with a G5.

I think setting up your sequences in pro res is a great idea and I use it all the time for long GOP projects. The only time I ever use pro res as my codec for digitizing is when I am offlining with HDcam. I don't see the point of digitizing HDV or XDcam as pro res since you only need to change the portions that you are actually using in your sequence to I frames (the point of pro res in an hdv project is to break the long GOP not for quality since there is no quality to be gained once you record to the tapes). For me on my Mac Pro I always get the dark green line in my sequence when I drop HDV clips into the pro res timeline. This is fine and leaves me with no noticeable loss in resolution but I could see how someone on a macbook could start to run into some problems when having to change to pro res. However, the render is fast and once completed everything shall become easier on your computer since again, there will be no more long GOP to deal with.