very simple capturing question..
 

Hi guys I got my FX1 today and Im very happy with the quality of it but I am having some trouble capturing to pc and knowing which settings to change based on whether I am capturing HDV or DV. I occasionally get the change format message, sometimes premiere pro 2.0 recognises the camera sometimes it doesnt. and I can not capture HDV using the 1080i preset in prem pro despite the camera being recognised...

If anyone knows of any quick and easy guides that just explain what settings need to be changed when I capture different formats it would be a great help, as the instruction manual doesnt seem to want to help me on this occasion.

Thanks in advance

Sony isn't known for having the best manuals, but p77 of your FX1E manual says it all. But I'll paraphrase:

To capture HDV tape to HDV project, set VCR to HDV and i.LINK CONV to OFF.

To capture DV tape to DV project, set VCR to DV.

To capture HDV tape to DV project, set VCR to HDV and i.LINK CONV to ON.

Make sure your Adobe presets match your video type. Check your capture window to confirm that HDV Device Control is selected if you're doing HDV. Also double-check your project preferences, making sure they are HDV all the way.

Congratulations on your new FX1 -- you're going to love it. I'd recommend spending a couple of hours with the manual, starting on p58 with the IN/OUT REC Menu. All you need is there.

Good luck with your new cam.

excellent thanks for that Adam. It seems to work ok now ive selected the correct settings. One quick question, why would I ever want to capture HDV into a DV project? Would that be better quality than DV into a DV project? Would it still be SD resolution? I tried to capture HDV with VCR set to HDV and conv on in a 720x576 16:9 Pal DV project but it didnt work.. did I do this wrong?

Also do you have any suggestions of software to get the best out of the HDV footage? I.E burning a high def DVD on either single or dual layer DVD?

Thanks

I think if you were SURE you'd never need the HDV footage and were only distributing to web or even DVD, you could downconvert HDV on capture and edit as a DV project. I'd never do that, as I think that sort of defeats the purpose of shooting in HDV. But it can be done.

Some people say editing downconverted HDV results in a better picture than original tape shot in DV, but I don't know how scientific those comparisons are. Seems to me it's better to start out with more resolution and then downconvert only when you burn to DVD, but I could be wrong.

At any rate, this will go into the PC as DV resolution, and may be easier for your PC to handle, depending upon your software. Not sure why your downconvert attempt didn't work; sounds like you had the right settings but Adobe has them hidden everywhere, so it may still have been looking for HDV input. In what way did it not work? What were your steps and what was the result? Did you have device control?

I haven't had the joy of attempting an HD disc of any kind -- I burn to regular DVD (which looks really nice, by the way) and doing the big public displays playing off an HDV tape master in my HC3 directly into HDTV screens. I save my FX1 for shooting.

I've been pretty happy with Premiere Pro on most issues except for transcoding down to SD for DVD, but according to others on this forum the problems seem to be fixed in CS3.

Hope this helps a little...

Adam, thanks for that. I will have a play around with the downconvert later today and let you know results.

What do you use to author your DVD's using the HDV footage? At the mo all i can do is convert to mpeg using mainconcept mpeg encoder, which shrinks it to a relatively small file considering its initial size.

I could do with some sort of software that would take the exported HDV mpeg and author the DVD to a video_ts folder if such a thing exists..

There's a very detailed thread about that here:

http://www.sonyhdvinfo.com/showthrea...1&page=1&pp=10

....but the short answer is when the HDV project is done, I export to tape. I then drag the m2t file that's been created in that process over to Nero and burn from there, and it comes out great.

More details at the link above.

Adam thanks that seems like a good idea..

i export to tape a lot but have never noticed a m2t file.. where does it put it? does it remain there once the export to tape is finished?

Then on nero what preset to you have to select before you choose all file types and drag the m2t file in?

Somewhere in your project preferences there should be a tick box to "save transcode file." In PPro 1.5.1 it's Project > Project Settings > General > Playback Settings and the tick box is there. Make sure it's checked.

Then when you go to File > Export > Export to Tape it'll spend a while rendering and then a typical "Save as" box will pop up asking for you to name and save the file, and you can choose where it goes. You'll see that the extension will be m2t. Once you've done all that it should write to tape. I suppose you could cancel the process at that point, but I always let it do the writing.

Then when everything is done, I just open Nero using the Smart Start suite Icon, and tell it I want to make a video DVD. It opens Nero Vision 4, which really doesn't give you any options. Click on Make DVD > DVD Video.
Next screen, click Add Video Files. Navigate to your project m2t, highlight it and click open.

Go through the remaining screens to choose menus and other stuff. It's pretty intuitive.

But it never gives you the option to set any advanced transcode/downscale settings. There's probably a more advanced version of the authoring tool buried elsewhere in the suite, but I find the more I monkey around with settings the worse it comes out and the more failed burns I have. I learned the hard way to just leave everything at default for the first go.

I'm sure there's a better way to do this using these tools but I stumbled onto this way and it works for me...

Hope this helps.

thankyou very much Adam, I just tried to give that a go, but cannot find that option anywhere in PP2.0 settings.... anyone have any idea?

Hm. This is interesting. I noticed that this sequence of dialog boxes only shows up in Premiere 1.5.1 if it's an HDV project, which uses the Cineform plug-in. For regular DV projects, which don't use the plug-in, a whole different set of screens appear. So maybe it's a Cineform thing; doesn't PPro 2.0 do HDV natively?

Maybe the Premiere boards here or at the Adobe website can help figure this out...