How should I edit my HDV footage?
 

I'm shooting a film in 1080i HDV, 25F mode on the Canon XH A1. I have Cineform Prospect for compressing the HDV footage to AVI. I also have Adobe Premiere Pro CS3.

My questions are:

Should I compress my footage with Cineform Prospect before editing in Premiere, or is it better to capture directly into Premiere?

If I compress using Cineform Prospect what quality settings should I use?

My system spec is:

Zoostorm Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 PC with a 500GB hard disk and 3GB RAM
An extra Western Digital 320GB Internal Hard Drive, 7200rpm, 16MB Cache

The 320GB drive is what I intend to use for my footage. The film will be around 30-40 mins and I will probably shoot about 10 hours of footage in total, not all of that will need to be put on the hard drive though. Will I need more hard disk space?

Thanks!

- If you're doing basic edits/cuts, HDV will work fine.
- If you're doing a lot of color correction/special effects, Cineform is better.
- If your movie actually makes it to film, it won't matter what format you edit in. The online editor/colorist normally requests the original HDV files and converts them via HD-SDI into their preferred file format.

I always capture the HDV files, but edit on low-res or transcoded files. I've found this workflow gives me the most flexibility when people don't know where the project will end up.

Thanks for the tips Michael. I thought Cineform was probably the way to go, I will be applying effects to my footage so I'll use Cineform. Do you use Cineform HDV capture in Premiere or the standalone Cineform capture program?

I notice the Premiere Cineform capture one doesn't give you quality settings, high, medium, low etc... so am not sure which is best.

I captured some footage using the standalone Cineform capture program and it came out at 11 MB per second in the high quality mode. That's 651 MB per minute or about 40 GB per hour. So I should just about manage with my current hard drive space as I will probably end up putting about 6 hours worth on the disk drive (240GB). I'll avoid putting the original HDV files on the disk drive as well as it will take too much space. Can you use the edited sequence to recapture the relevant HDV footage from tape if you did need film out later on?

Think I might need a bigger disk drive, but I'll also need a bigger backup drive if so, it all adds up and I've just forked out for an XH A1 and a bigger monitor etc etc...

I use the standalone Cineform program and edit in Vegas or Final Cut Pro.

When you capture in Premiere to a Cineform preset, the raw HDV stream comes in losslessly by firewire and is then transcoded on the fly to Cineform avis (or movs).

The quality setting for that transcode process is controlled by your "Preference" settings in HDLink.... in other words you have exactly the same quality control whether you capture in HDLink or Premiere.

Thanks graham. That's just what I wanted to know. I'll use the capture tool in Premiere then, with the HD link set to high quality.