Fcp / hdv / xha1
 

I just got finished filming over a week in LA for a documentary I am working on (xha1/1080i/24F) and I was wondering what most of you guys capture as? From what I have read online it seems Prores 442 is the way to go.

I am about to start this project where I am editing the whole thing in FCP. My last feature project was done completely in Vegas so this is a bit of a learning curve so before I start logging and capturing all 21 hours of footage I wanted to make sure my settings were correct (their are so many options).

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. I use a Mac Pro Quad Core 2.66 with 16gb of ram.

O.D.

I usually capture & edit in HDV, then convert to ProRes as needed for transitions, f/x, and color correction.

So you wouldn't recommend capturing as Prores? How is the work flow editing as HDV?

ProRes 422 (not 442) is the way to go if you listen only to the people who say as much.

Reality is, capturing as ProRes 422 won't improve your HDV image- it will just make it less susceptible to degradation in post-production workflow by giving you a much higher data rate and better color space to work in. This doesn't come without a cost, however- the data rate for ProRes 422 HQ is a whopping 220 Mbps, compared to HDV's 25 Mbps, and ProRes HQ requires over 7x more disk space than HDV. So the real cost of ProRes is hard drive space and processing power. To get an idea of what this means for your editing experience, I would capture an hour of video in each codec and compare how they are to work with, scrub through, edit, and render changes.

As Michael has pointed out, one solution many of us use is to capture & edit HDV and render your changes in ProRes to sort of get the best of both worlds.

So if I have unlimited hard drive space and my computer can handle the work flow then ProRes 422 would be the way to go?

Have you tried editing & rendering ProRes vs. HDV on your system? That might help you make the decision about what is better for you.

I've done a lot of small project using ProRes (never HDV) and really liked it a lot, no lag and the effects and transittions were rendered very quickly. When I shot it over to compressor (mpeg2 and ac3) and burned it looked great on my hdtv.

I'm just making sure this is my best option for quality and ease of use. I know HDV is highly compressed.