My main concern shooting HDV is losing quality. I capture HDV into Premier 2.0 but it takes seeming forever to export back to tape. I am talking hours on a hour long video. Is this par for the course? whats a better way to export video and retain the full quality?

also what is a good way to share short HD video clips (1-5 min) on the net without making it a weekend project

My main concern shooting HDV is losing quality. I capture HDV into Premier 2.0 but it takes seeming forever to export back to tape. I am talking hours on a hour long video. Is this par for the course? whats a better way to export video and retain the full quality?

also what is a good way to share short HD video clips (1-5 min) on the net without making it a weekend project

What is your system set up ? Are you using Cineform, or are you just editing in HDV ?

As far as internet clips, I found the easiest is using 2.0, editing in HDV, and exporting using the Adobe encoder to a HD Windows media file. I think I use the Version 9 encoders supplied in the selection section after selecting Windows media file. It does a real nice job.

i am just editing native hdv not using cineform. Not positive on my system set up as i didn't build the computer it was a goft. But my harvard grad partner built the computer after much research and its got ample power to do HD editing.

I am running 600 gigs of HD space (one of the few things i do know)

on your camera and setup, you might stand a better chance of getting a helpful reply.

For example, as I understand it, PPro 2.0 doesn't play nice with native mode, (at least not from an HVX200), unless you use something like one of Cineform's products.

i have 3 cameras fx-1 hc-1000 and the small sony HD cam.

My main question is what format do I have to keep my footage in to not lose quality? do I lose quality switching to uncompresssed .avi from the captured .mpeg format?
How long should it take to render and export to tape 1 hour of HDV footage from premier pro 2.0?

Exporting an hour of HDV to tape takes...an hour! That's determined simply by the speed the tape in your camera turns at.

So what you are really asking is "how long does it take to render some edited footage to an export-to-tape compatible HDV file?" And the answer to that depends on two things:

1) What CPU do you have (and to a certain extent what RAM and hard-drives)?

2) What editing have you done on the footage? If all you did was simple cuts, then essentially no rendering is required. If you (for example) color corrected all your footage then the whole timeline has to be re-rendered.

So no-one can answer your question, as it stands, because we don't have any information on either of the above. If you are on a PC, simply right-click on "My computer" and select "properties" to see your CPU and RAM specs.

Regarding conversion to uncompressed, no you won't lose further quality. But what are you going to do with the resulting footage? - presumeably recompress it back to HDV if your goal is exporting to tape, or to something like WMV if it's headed to the web? And when you do that recompression, you will indeed lose quality.