This may have been answered before and i have asked a similar question but i cannot find the posts that give me the clear to go ahead....

We are shooting a mixture of HDV 720p (JVC) and 1080i (Z1) on a wildlife project. Our initial plan was to mix the two in the timeline but down or up converting the footage to one flavour. However we are now in a situation where we will have telecined S16mm and some SD miniDV footage to work with as well as some CGI. I would ideally like to have one format to work with i.e. to simply 'acquire' with HDV and the rest and then work in a single codec. I have heard that the way to go may be to capture with DVCpro. Having worked on edits with both native HDV and DVCpro I am keen to avoid the render times I experienced with the HDV.

Can anybody tell me if this is a good plan? What are the alternatives? Essentially is there a failsafe workflow that will not leave us in a corner?

The output is an SD broadcast and DVD but we are keen to have the 'HD' option when HDVD become more of a reality.

I apolagised if this has been covered, if so can somebody direct me to the appropriate post/s?

Thanks in advance,

James

I would ideally like to have one format to work with i.e. to simply 'acquire' with HDV and the rest and then work in a single codec. I have heard that the way to go may be to capture with DVCpro. Having worked on edits with both native HDV and DVCpro I am keen to avoid the render times I experienced with the HDV.

Are you working on PCs or Macs? If you're on a PC you could try working in Edius using the Canopus HQ codec, or use Adobe Premiere with the Cineform codec. If you're on a Mac then converting to DVCProHD might be a suitable solution, but you do lose a little horizontal resolution when changing the HDV source to that format.

Dont use DVCproHD. It scales everything down to 1080x1280 and really isnt a good solution for your online edit (offline is fine)

If you shot your 720p footage in 24fps, I would stick with that. You can easily take 60i footage and 3:2 it down to 24p(23.976). 30p is a whole 'nother animal, and is a pain to mix with 24p stuff. Was your S16 footage actually 'telecined' to 60i or just transfered to tape at 24p(23.976)? This would also dictate which format is best. Leaving the resolution and frame rate alone, and just focusing on a codec, I would say photojpeg 75% is your best bet for having a really good looking image and still being able to have the storage space to deal with it all. If you are using a powermac or pc to edit on, sheervideo is a good codec too (no intel version yet).

Post all of your formats, including resolution, frame rate, and codec so we can get a better idea of what your working with.