Best HDV Ingesting method for easy editing?

[Darryn Carroll]

A lot of you already know the deal here, I have purchased the FX1000 and the FX1. When I used my VX2100's, I would ingest as AVI so I could render couple times without losing quality. Its my crazy workflow, I know, but after a wedding, I would end up with 4 tapes. I could ingest all 4, then edit one at a time, rendering each to Edited1, Edited2, etc. My final project i would add them together, add some music and text, and burn a DVD. I em extremely comfortable with this workflow and am looking for suggestions on ingesting, editing and rendering so I can now do the same with HDV. I believe each time I render to MP4 I would lose quality? Is there a format similar to AVI for HD that allows me lossless rendering yet still PC resource friendly?

[Chris Medico]

It depends on what you are referring to. MP4 is a wrapper much like AVI. You can choose the codec within the wrappers limitations and store your video in there with no rerendering and thus no loss in quality.

The short answer is - yes - you can store HDV in a MP4 wrapper just as you stored DV in an AVI wrapper.

[Darryn Carroll]

Thanks Chris. Any good or recommended way of ingesting from HDV to MP4. I have Sony Movie Studio and HDVSplit which i like because both show if there were dropped frames, but it seems they only ingest as AVCHD.

Also, once I have my HD footage in my NLE, do I need to render to certain formats for it to be HD? In other words, if I render to AVI or even MPEG2, is it still HD quality?

[Chris Medico]

What is your NLE? Does it have a logging function?

[Eric Olson]

Originally Posted by Darryn Carroll

Thanks Chris. Any good or recommended way of ingesting from HDV to MP4. I have Sony Movie Studio and HDVSplit which i like because both show if there were dropped frames, but it seems they only ingest as AVCHD.

Also, once I have my HD footage in my NLE, do I need to render to certain formats for it to be HD? In other words, if I render to AVI or even MPEG2, is it still HD quality?

The files ingested from the FX1000 and FX1 are not AVCHD. I'll try to explain.

When you capture HDV with Vegas or HDVSplit the resulting mpeg2 transport streams are stored in files with an extention such as .m2ts, .m2t or .mts. Not surprisingly these files contain both an mpeg2 video track and an mpeg2 audio track. They are not AVCHD files. AVCHD files are also mpeg2 transport streams and have similar file extensions. However, those files contain H264 encoded video and AC3 audio.

As I recall, your goal is to create both DVD and web video. DVDs contain mpeg2 program stream files with mpeg2 video and AC3 audio. Web video files have a file extension of .mp4 and contain progressive H264 encoded video and AAC audio. It's a lot to keep straight, but Vegas has presets that get it right automatically.

Here is one idea for a simple workflow that gives pretty good results. Edit your HDV files and render using one of the high-quality bluray presets. Import the resulting HD files created by Vegas into DVD Architect. From there you can master both a bluray disk and a DVD. Finally, use the free program MeGUI to convert the HD files created by Vegas to .mp4 format for the web.

MeGUI | Free Audio & Video software downloads at SourceForge.net

While you can also use Vegas to directly create the web files, MeGUI uses the x264 encoding engine which creates better quality output at the ultralow bitrates needed for web video.

[Adam Gold]

Vegas will capture all your files as m2t. Don't change this. Edit away and when you're done, render as you wish to match your desired destination. Don't worry about rendering until you are done.

Best to move up to Vegas Pro at this point if you are serious about your work. Movie Studio may be a bit limiting.

AVCHD is not a tape format and doesn't enter into this discussion unless you have set something incorrectly. If, as you indicate on your other thread, your NLE doesn't see the cam, you have a settings mismatch. Either you have your cam set to downconvert or otherwise output DV and an HDV project set up in your NLE, or vice-versa. It's the most common reason for Invisible Camcorder Syndrome/Failed Captures.