Hello,

My name's John. I'm new to this board.

I am planning on shooting a film in 720p/24p on a JVC GY-HD110u. I then hope to transfer the film to 1080i/60i HDCAM (as I understand this is the film festival standard.)

I realize the HDCAM transfer won't be nessessary until the film is accepted into festivals, (if it is at all) but I would like to avoid problems down the road and map out my workflow ahead of time.

What editing software should I use? (I'm a PC person.) How much can I expect to spend on the HDCAM transfer? (The film will run around 75 minutes.) Will the HDCAM tape need another round of color correction? If so, do I need to be present for that? (I live in Pittsburgh. I'll probably have to send away to a facility in some other state.)

Also, I have heard it is possible to make some sort of uncompressed .avi file, transfer it to an external hard drive and take that to a transfer house to make a HDCAM tape. What programs allow this? And what transfer houses support it?

It should be obvious by now that I do not know what I'm talking about. I'm aware of that. If there is any additional information that you feel I need to know, please share it.

Thanks.

OK, that was a whole bunch of questions, I understand nobody wanting to take the time to answer all of them.

Maybe you could just give me the name of a decent transfer house? I bet they'd be able to help.

I'm in the same boat as I want to submit to film festivals, but the one here has been stingy on even giving out their HD technical requirements. They seem to want to view your work before telling you what is needed. I was told that it is usually very expensive, but I don't see a real reason for this. They did say that the people that have done HDV-HDCAM so far have done color correction during the transfer process. I don't think this step should be necessary and that a straight duplicate from HDV should work as long as you did proper color correction and have all your levels appropriate for the HDCAM signal. I'm sure that someone around that works with both HDV and HDCAM can tell you if you need to tweak your color correction for HDCAM.