Offline HDV editing capture preset on FCP 5?
 

I have a few hours of Sony HDV footage I would like to edit. Trouble is, I don't have enough space to digitize all of it. In the past, I have had some luck doing a offline edit using the technique described here:

http://www.tgr.com/weblog/archives/000003.html

I am wondering if I can do an offline edit using some lower resolution footage, and then recapture the HDV footage of the final edit.

The major problem I encountered in the past was that I had shot letterbox footage on an XL1, captured it at PhotoJPEG resolution (which is 320x240), but when I recaptured just the footage of the final cut at NTSC resolution (which is 720x480), everything got all distorted which was just a terrible nightmare.

These days, I have been doing a in-camera HDV->SD downconvert, and then capturing in FCP at full (720x480) NTSC resolution. This has resulted in no problem relating to the native 16x9 format of the HDV.

My thinking is that instead of PhotoJPEG, I should make a custom capture preset which is half of 720x480 (@360x240) instead of PhotoJPEG's 320x240. Is this reasoning solid? Anybody know from experience?

Anyway, the HDV->SD downconvert doesn't really work well at all for my purposes, and for this project I NEED to finish in HDV.

The reason I can't just do a test is because I don't have a working version of Final Cut Pro 5 right now, just FCP4.5. So, I am wondering if it is safe to capture all the footage at my custom NTSC resolution (360x240), and then pretty much have a smooth process taking my edit online at HDV resolution?

Finally, does anybody have any related words to the wise, other related issues I might not have considered?

Thanks in advance.

Also, what is the deal with rendering? I tried capturing with PhotoJPEG as the compression, but I have to render it eachtime I cut in a clip. What a pain! Isn't there some offline resolution (that takes up less space than NTSC) that doesn't require rendering?

wow. no answers.

is there some other forum somewhere on the net where people know about FCP?

Horrible distorted in what way? Do you mean horizontally squished? Anyway how do you capture letterbox footage on an XL1? I assume it does anamorphic, but have never found letter box on an XL1.

Once you go away from the FCP built in presets for offline RT you can run into trouble with built in effects. OfflineRT is optimised for certain resolutions. There is 320*240 anamorphic settings or 384*216 resolutions to choose from. Both will give you 16:9 IIRC compression also has to be 25%.
Capture at 320*240 Anamorphic offlineRT res' for capture and sequence settings, don't try a roll your own setting. Then reset the sequence settings and capture settings to HDV 1080i and recapture. FCP 5 should handle this pretty easily
Well, you might want to try filling in the blanks on your user profile. You're a bit of an unknown quanity, even your name seems odd, seeing as it's also one used by a well known band, and can look to some people like a spuedonym rather than a real name.