I've finished a spot shot in HDV, I had to conform to D1 which was a HUGE pain in and of itself with reformatting graphics and scaling the video down to fit into the 4:3 window...

Now they're asking for a Digibeta dub.

They want me to run them off a BetaSp dub and then they'll take that to a dupe house and copy it off to digibeta. I'd like to be able to give them the highest quality source possible... is there any way to print a 4:3 sequence back off to a HDV tape?

Every time I try to print to video all i get is an error that says...

" Unable to perform print to video operation for HDV as RT exreme is not supported. Improve CPU speed and/or RAM needed to enable RT Extreme and HDV Print to Video"

This seems silly to me as I'm on a Quad 2.5 with 4.5 Gig of ram! Does this have something to do with the fact that I'm still on 5.0.4? is it just not possible to print off a sequence to HDV? Does it have something to do with the D1 resolution change?

Thanks!

-Adam

You went one step too far.

Do not print standard def back onto HDV tape. You can record SD onto DV or DVCam and bring that to the DigiBeta House.

For higher quality, you need to answer these questions, did you edit in HD or down-covert all the files to SD before editing? What video format setting is the edit timeline set too?

If you have an acceptable SD timeline and a Final Cut friendly production house around, you should make a self-contained Quicktime movie of the timeline and bring that digital file to the production house. They can open it in Final Cut Pro there and print to a DigiBeta master. Be sure to ask the house what codec they want the file in. I do this frequently to save on DigiBeta costs during editing. The quality is perfect.

Thanks William,

I didn the edit in HD & then reformatted to fit in the SD 4:3 timeline. I have multiple timelines with the same edit that are at different resolutions for different outputs.

The idea of sending a QT file was my obvious choice, but i'm dealing with a corporate roadblock here who doesn't want to listen to ideas. They don't think that the cost difference between having a production facility use their NLE to output to Digi will be worth the difference in cost over a SP to Digi straight dupe.

I did answer one of my own questions tho. The HDV resolution can't change. For FCP to be able to playback a HDV signal to the BR-HD50 you have to have to set at HDV 1280x720 (or so it seems to me).

I was hoping that i'd be able to use the increased pixel count to give a better dupe to Digibeta. One way that I could sort of fudge this is to take my 4:3 final edit source and change the aspect to fill a 16:9 Anti-animorphically so that the output of a HDV deck will squish back to 4:3 when doing a Digi Dub.

I'm still holding out hope on the QT file tho...