In Camera or In Post?
 

Given that the HDV codec is not supposed to handle post production manipulation terribly well (someone correct me if I am wrong) does it follow that it woul be best to plan the look you want in camera (which is what I have been doing) ?

Rob

I think the codec handles color corrections splendidly and it does chromakey pretty well. I especially like what Magic Bullet II does for the footage (in moderation). However, I think getting the image as close as you can in camera saves a lot of time in post so I lean that way when shooting.

What Stephen Said. :)

HDV will only take rather modest color correction before things start to show. You want to get close in camera. If anything I would recomend shooting with shadows as open as possible, and don't burn the highlights. Its easy to add contrast back with ped and gamma adjustments and make the image darker & more contrasty. Making images that are under exposed lighter will fall apart if you are making more than small corrections. You will also find some odd color shifting due to DSP with under exposed shots, so the moral is, get your exposure right in the first place and figure you are ok in post if all you are doing is small shot matching and adding contrast in.

I've done a few sky replacements and they went ok, but compression artifacts were a bit of an issue. If you think you are gonna replace skys or do chromakeys the best advice is get it as close to perfect in camera as possible. In the sky shots I did, I roto'd several buildings in shots because I got perfectly clean edges that way. trees I was able to key and matte choke and got some reasonably ok results. bottom line is all compressed formats will have these problems. the only real option is to take the camera output and record it direct to HD uncompressed if you have to do a lot of high quality key work. in a studio, this isn't a big deal, but on location, thats another story.

Steve Oakley