HDV rendering in Native
 

I'm working on my first HDV project in FCP5.1.4 using my MBPro, 2.33. Looking at past posts it seems like if one edits cuts moving i/o points back and forth, rendering multiple times results in 'mucky' looking video since HDV has to conform these points due to GOP, I believe it's called.

But when one finally gets the i/o points one wants, if one deletes the render files and starts over rendering won't that obviate that?

And undoing renders to get back to the original state also obviates that, right?

thanks,
elmer

This is a good question, i would be interested in the answer too as i've only owned fcp for a few days and have very little idea as to what is the optimal way to use it for retaining data integrity yet. I guess the question is, when you save/output your project and it saves/transmits the data from the frames that at one point might have been rendered as an i-frame does it use the previously rendered version of that frame or does it pull the frame information from it's information in the original "GOP data" on your harddisk? It seems like it would be logical to use the latter method but again I have no idea what i'm talking about when it comes to fcp.

I use native HDV to offline whole projects. This way it is a very WYSIWYG experience. If the project is destined for broadcast downconversion or HDCAM, I then simply nest the HDV sequence into an uncompressed 8-bit sequence and render once. No generation loss.

If the project needs to be output back to m2t, then I will print to tape from the HDV ssequence. The nice thing about the way FCP handles HDV is that it only renders what NEEDS to be rendered, and keeps the rest of the frames intact.