New to HD editing
 

Ok,

so I finally made the move to HD. Bought the XH-A1, using FCP 5.1 HD. What settings should I make when capturing? What are the best steps? I hear so much about pulldownds and timelines to SD, pretty confusing. Any suggestions?

if you could please number steps so I don't miss a thing!



thanks!

XHA1 and fcp
 

A lot depends on what your shooting setup is. Here we shoot everything 1080i and download the tapes from Sony HDV decks. So our custom easy setup is: sequence preset 1080i60, capture preset HDV, device control sony hdv firewire, playback to suit your setup (digital cinema desk top preview and audio built in line output in our case) edit to tape HDV 1440x1080 60i, and audio HDV. If you are downloading from the camera, the "HDV 1080i60 Firewire Basic" easy setup that comes installed in FCP5 probably will handle everything for you. If you are doing 24 frame or something, your setup choices would change accordingly.

In the Log and Capture window, be sure clip settings for both audio and video are checked; if you are doing HDV you might find the option to create new clip on start/stop to be useful. We just start the player, hit "capture now" and let fcp split the incoming video into individual clips. None of us have had much luck in HDV with the batch capture feature and it takes forever at best. If you have a long take and just want a small subset the log clip feature is useful but for our (newspaper web site) work, our takes are usually only a few minutes and the capture now feature works great. If you are recording standard def the start/stop logging doesn't work and it works better to just log the entire clip and then do markers for sub-clips when you get the file into the viewer. Message if any of us here can be of any help. // Battle Vaughan / Miami Herald video team