Handbrake- HD footage
 

Hi! I'm editing short films of a classical musical recital that was shot in HD. I have been given a dvd with all of the HD footage.
I want to bring it into final cut.
I assume I have to use a program like handbrake to isolate my footage.
Isn't that the right idea?
For the best quality what should my output settings be?
Right now, I'm going with AVI
video codec MPEG-4
Frame rate- same as source.

When people shoot on HD what do they usually shot onto ... in other words are they using a Dv tape or a chip or what?
Thanks
Katie

Which version HD? HDV, AVCHD, P2, XDCAM, other?

DVD video or data DVD? What delivery medium? In short what is your source material and what needs to be your output format for what medium, BR, DVD, web?

You never want to actually edit MPEG 4 video. As far as I'm concerned, it is a delivery format only.

Like Harm asked, you need to find out what footage you're dealing with. The file extention won't tell you. MOV or AVI means almost nothing when it comes to editing formats.

Try and play the files in quicktime and go to window --> show movie inspector. This window should tell you the frame size and format of the video.

Also, don't use Handbrake for this job. Use MPEG Streamclip (Let me google that for you). It will give you many more output options including ProRes 422.

[QUOTE=Harm Millaard;1173086]Which version HD? HDV, AVCHD, P2, XDCAM, other?

Hi Harm, I'll try to answer your questions with all the info I can give you...
Its a DVD video. When I pop it in, the DVD player comes up and it plays like that. It's not a data DVD. I'm still trying to figure out what it was shot on.
My output is primarily for the Web but I'd also like to put it on a DVD.
Thanks for your help,
Katie

Katie,

When the video DVD plays like that, it has got to be MPEG2-DVD as source. It has already been edited and compressed to put it on DVD. Therefore it has lost everything that may at one time have been related to HD, it is only SD now. Whether it has been shot in HD or 4K or 70 mm film is completely irrelevant, since burning it on DVD has lost all the original quality. No way to get that back. Editing that material will only make it worse, because it needs to be recompressed or encoded again, losing quality in the process.

You have two options, either get the original material or work with what you got and tell your client that the result will be even worse than what he delivered.