HD Rough Cut Workflow?
 

As I'm somewhat painfully discovering, HD ain't SD. Stop laughing. I recently went HD tapeless and have done a few small projects. Sending out rough cuts, after all the mix downs, transcodes etc. hasn't been too bad, but again, these were projects in the 3 to 4 minute range.

My question is, what about the 55 minute project? I have a project, shot HD, that runs 55 minutes. How do I get my client a rough cut in say Windows Media without going through the hours and hours of transcoding?

I purchased Sony's HD700 assuming I could just output to HD tape in real time. Oops! That's a no-go without transcoding etc.

What do others do with long form HD projects regarding rough cuts?

Apple PowerMac. Avid MC 5. Canon XF300

Depends on your system. As you are running Avid your choices are a little more limited. A lot of the time the solution can be hardware based, I.e on fcp with a kona card I could just play out to a DVD recorder if I wanted a real time export. Alternatively you could look at a transcoding solution like the elgato turbo, although that will only assist if you can output a QT ref out of Avid without transcoding.

On a media composer system, I am guessing taking a feed out of an Matrox MXO output box to a DVD recorder or DVR type system would be the most cost effective way to ensure realtime output to a viewable format without tying up the suite transcoding for an indeterminate amount of time, although I'm assuming that the mxo can handle the downscaling. (one of the big issues with moving to HD projects is not being able to give clients ironclad times to having an output of a viewing copy. Currently there are few cost effective realtime recording solutions for HD media that allow ease of viewing at the client end. Hardware downscaling and output for editorial viewing at least allows peace of mind in that regard until you have your file based workflow sorted to give you a reliably high quality output at a reasonable speed. Don't know enough about Avid MC transcodes to offer advice there, especially if you are cutting long GOP formats that have to be transcodes to get out of the avid.

The MX02 mini (I have one) downscales in real time, and sending that to a basic recorder should work just fine. Not too expensive either.

If you're worried about tying up the edit system, doing a reference MOV to Squeeze should work fine unless you are bringing in your stuff via AMA.