Work Flow: DVC ProHD to D-VHS?
 

As a "prosumer" high end HD aficionado whose home system revolves around HD digital capture over satellite and archiving to hard disc (LG LST-3410a) and D-VHS (using dirt cheap S-VHS tapes) over firewire via the solutions offered by www.169time.com, I too am pondering my personal HD camcording options.

The HDV camcorders from JVC and Sony both present difficult work flow and cost effectiveness problems.
The older JVC's are by far the smallest and least $$, but only Steve Mullen seems to have figured out how to work around their firmware shortcomings.
The new JVC looks great but is too bulky and $$.
The Sony still does not seem to have a convenient means of archiving and playing back edited footage short of recording that footage back to DV tape on the camcorder.

Capture of DVCProHD from the HVX200 to hard disc via a FireStore like HDD would appear to be the best means of obtaining high quality HD footage at the lowest possible price.

Is there an editing solution that would allow one to cost effectively convert raw or edited DVCProHD content to mpeg II for archiving and distribution via D-VHS?

Welcome to DV Info Net, Todd.

Although I'm sure that DVCPRO HD can go some way, somehow to D-VHS, I'm not familiar with the steps involved in that workflow. Does anybody else here have any suggestions?

1 possible solution, although I'd be hard pressed to explain why you'd do it:

I don't believe there are any D-VHS decks that accept component input, so you wouldn't be able to go analog from the HVX200 to D-VHS. The firewire protocol for the HVX200 should be identical to the Panasonic AJ-HD1200A, meaning you need a device on the other end that recognizes a DVCPro-HD stream, not an MPEG-2 stream, such as HDTV tuners or D-VHS decks. So, no way to get from camera to deck directly.

That being said, all major editors will now, or will soon support both DVCPro-HD by firewire AND HDV by firewire. You input with the HVX200 by Firewire, edit, then export the finished program as an HDV file, open it up in an HDV timeline, then export by Firewire to your D-VHS deck. If I'm correct, you should be able to do this with the newest versions of FCP or Premiere or Avid that support both formats. If I'm wrong about this, someone please chime in! I can understand why you'd want to distribute a finished program this way, as people can buy a D-VHS deck today, and play back the program in HD, right now.

For archival purposes, however, I would never degrade the DVCPro-HD content by transcoding to MPEG-2. Even if you could get the full 23 (is it?) Mb/s that D-VHS is capable of, it will be a highly degraded signal from DVCPro-HD's 100Mb/s. If you ever want to go back to that footage and color-correct or do any other heavy processing, you need that original footage. Not only is it a much more gentle compression to hold up to to the rigors of post, but it is a frame-based compression instead of MPEG-2's long-GOP structure (discussed to death here, sorry if I'm being redundant).

Thankfully, Panasonic is trying to wean us all off tape and start thinking about our footage as an IT storage issue. If it's all just data anyway, that's how we should start thinking about archiving and storage. For the next year or two, that means multiple redundant external hard drives (or just a single external drive if you're willing to live on the edge a bit). That's the cheapest bang for your buck for backing up hundreds of gigabytes of data. In three or four years, some form of high-capacity optical storage will be as cheap as current DVD media, then you can archive all that data to cheap discs. As soon as the Blu-Ray/HDVD thing sorts itself out with consumer players, the disks and PC drives will commoditize fairly quickly.

FCP, Avid, and Premiere support transcoding of DVCPro-HD to MPEG-2 (HDV or mpeg.ts) for export?

If true that would indeed be an ideal solution, although your point about archiving the original footage 'as is' in DVCPro-HD is well taken.

Would then seem to me that pairing the HVX200 with an iPod or Firestore like storage device would be a very high quality and cost effective mens of HD acquisition. Editing could then be done in DVCPro-HD's more edit friendly and less compressed format before export of a D-VHS friendly format to tape or hard-disc.

Do FCP, Avid and Premiere really allow transcoding from one codec to another?

If a firestore is available for the HVX200, It will be much more cost-effective and offer much longer run times than P2 media, at least for the short-term. I think it's a forgone conclusion, and it's already been discussed at length.

Something to remember about shooting for personal reasons instead of projects for pay: You're going to want this footage forever. I often think that footage I shoot of my child in DV with a VX-2000 is going to look awfully quaint in 20 years, when we're all watching ultra-high-definition on every tv/computer screen. In a way, it's almost more important to save your personal memories in the highest quality, most native format possible.

Until we get our hands on Final Cut 5, it will be hard to say what challenges there will be in this trancoded workflow. I will say this: going between different SD codecs in FCP is fairly painless, as it is with any Quicktime-enabled application. It's standard practice to go from one codec to another, and be able to switch between applications, say, FCP and Premiere to After Effects, then back again.