Capturing from XHA1
 

I just purchased mt first HD camera....a XHA1. Until I get an hdv deck I will be capturing off the camera. I have a Mac Pro with FCP2 and also just added a Blackmagic extreme HD card. What will be the best connection for the camera to card, and what settings should I be capturing in. My projects will be submitted in SD for via Beta Sp. I've been told that I should film in HD, capture in pro rez and then downcovert to sd before it goes to the beta deck. Does this sound right?

I use PC and capture from the camera using Adobe Premiere Pro just so you know, but personally I would shoot in HD, Capture in HD, and the after editing I would export my final in SD. I wouldn't overthink it, it will look great that way if you absolutly have to end up with SD.

I second that. I shot in HD, captured and edit in HD. Then export to MPEG-2 for DVD authoring and H.264 for BluRay.

If this is for your hunting show, IE broadcast TV, then I would shoot in HD, and let the camera do the down conversion to SD when you capture to computer.
Edit in SD, then output to Beta sp. That would be your easiest workflow.

You are going to get advice from amateurs who do not do broadcast work,
and have never had to worry about supers and bugs not being positioned correctly after editing in HD and converting to SD after an edit.

Good Luck!

Thanks
 

Thanks for the comments. David you are correct, this is for broadcast work. Right now, all my footage has been shot on SD cameras. I plan on using the XH for my cutaways and interviews for now, so I will have a mixture of formats to deal with. What I was told to do was get the capture card, capture my SD footage as Pro Rez or Uncompressed for better quality....so I figured capturing my hd as Pro Rez also would keep my workflow smoother??

Taky: When exporting in MPEG2, is there any loss in quality? I typically burn right to disk. I also have a project that i'm working on which I will need to be able to work on iun differnt locations. Is exporting in MPEG-2 and then just dropping the file into a time lime the best option for this? Also, when capturing from the XHA1, is the footage being captured in an MPEG-2? I never had to worry about this until recently because in the past I went straight from the timeline to DVD. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

If you are exporting from timeline to DVD (are you using Premiere?), it transcode to MPEG-2 for you. MPEG-2 is a lossy format.

MPEG-2 is a very popular format so it's good for portability not to worry about if the playback computer is fast enough to handle or if you have the proper codec.

HDV is also MPEG-2 (transport stream). So when you capture your footage from XH-A1 either as .mpeg or .m2t, they are both MPEG-2 file codec.

Taky: I'm using Pinnicale 12. So oit sounds like if i'm buring a dvd from am MPEG-2 file, I'm not going to get good results. If I save my project as an MPEG-2 file, take it to another editing system, work on it, then bring it back to Pinnicale can I then burn to DVD using my regular Pinnicale settings from which I get good results? I'm just trying to fugre out the best way to save my work so that I can ulitimalty get the dvd authoed and have the encryption put on it so that it can not be copied.

First, there is no DVD encryption that can't be cracked. So you should forget about that aspect. If you still want to apply copyright protection, those DVDs can only be made pressed. You can't burn those at home. It's pretty much effort-less even to make copies of commercial DVDs.

I'm not familiar with Pinnicle. If it can edit HDV, that's MPEG-2. Then why don't you just export to DVD within Pinnicle? If you can bring it to other editing program, then why don't you use that program to export to DVD?

The reason that I dont wnt to export from PInnicale is because I will be makng large quantites of the DVD. I'm trying to figure out the best way to get the project to a company htat can not only mass produce the dvd, but can also put the encrytion on it. Thats why I was wondering if I should just give then the file in an MPEG-2 format. I jsut need to make sure that if MPEG-2 is the way, that they in turn can export it to dvd in a fashion where the quality of both the video and audio can be preserved. In this case, the audio is very important. In Pinnical I use the "best quality" setting for video, and PCM for audio. The reult is great! I was hoping someone could tell me how to keep everything intact thru the process.

This is generally what I do. Down-converting isn't necessary because even if you shoot and edit HD footage, you can export a file that has an HD resolution into an SD format that has a SD resolution.