Just edited a small amount of Varicam 24p HD footage recently, and I have to say I hate HD.

When you're editing HD, everything is so much slower. Drop in any effect in Final Cut Pro and it needs to render. If you want to do complicated effects, you start getting renders that take 6 minutes for 10 seconds of footage.

Granted, HD does look better.
A- The cameras tend to be really nice. But if you work with SD, you could just get something like a Panasonic SDX900 (DVCPRO50).
B- Ignoring the camera (which you can do if you work off downconverts), HD is only sharper.
C- Most people can't even get HD quality. In the case of this project, the target format is web download/streaming.

Anyways, I'll get off my soapbox now...

HD is going to be a new experience for everyone when it comes to the editing systems and the complications that seem to go with it. I do remember a time about 10 years ago when rendering a few minutes on Premiere took hours!!!

Didn't we all go through this process just ten short years ago? History repeats itself!

It's not History "repeating itself", it is how WE repeat our reactions to History that is repeated - now THAT is worth repeating!

Seriously - and just for a nano second here - it is this which makes us the thinkers we are.

We are mid-term in the evolution of survivalists and sapiens. We ain't there yet. We can only refer to history as to that which places us "outside" a problem, so we can view it in some form of isolation.

Bertrand Russel had it for me .. and here I badly paraphrase, "It is not the act we need to apprehend, but the act of apprehension we need to apprehend". For me, this means it is not just how we "solve" a problem, but the "way" we go about solving problems that can in itself becomes part of the problem solving, which in turn can add to the original problem.

It is not just about having an appealing homily "History repeats" that gives shape to our futile quests - it's that I/we need to do this. It IS part of our survivalist urge. And it can be that which also "shackles" our creativity to.

So what Premiere took 10 hours to render 2 minutes? That was 10 hours we could "think" about finding ways to make it do it faster. Plus, we have had to have experienced "A" so that we will be aware of the need for "B".

Blasto! I just wanna get shorter DoF with my XM2! Nothing more .. nothing less . . .

Regards,

Grazie