Advice: best strategy for Xdcam EX, AVCHD & HDV
 

Hi All

I've a long (2 hour) stage show shot with Sony Ex1 with an AVCHD cam and HDV cam as exttra angles. EX1 shot 1080i/25.

I'm targeting 16:9 SD output on DVD but in editing, wish to maintain the following flexibility;

1. Multi-camera editing (necesitates identical codec on all footage).
2. Ability to scale & pan HD footage on SD timeline for shot re-framing

My immediate thought is to take everyting in as ProRes and edit on SD timeline

The attraction here is that the AVCHD goes straight to ProRes on ingest and that format gives me the above features.

However, bumping everything up to ProRes increases the data rate and hence file size, right? Running three Prores streams in multi-cam editing mode will tax my machine, drives etc., right?

So, before I go ahead with this, any thoughts on an alternate ingest strategy?

Thanks in advance

Peter

I would say transcoding everything to Pro Res is a good idea. With multi camera editing I'd say you'd be fine with a speedy internal drive or two. If you are running a Mac Pro you should be well suited for this but if not then you can turn down the quality to allow smoother playback. Talking about quality though, I would cut and do all color grading and graphics in HD in a Pro Res timeline. Staying in HD will give you more play in color grading but will also give your more flexibility as to deliverables. If you don't need to do a center cut for SD then just let Compressor or whatever your encoding software choice is do the anamorphic downconvert.

What machine do you have?

ProRes modestly taxes the drives not the computer if you have a dual G5 and above. HDV and AVCHD tax your computer's processor resources more.

Thanks all for the reponses. I'll go ProRes and be happy with it!

Peter

You'll love Pro Res, no Mpeg-2 conforming before a render. Oddly enough my mom comes from Carrickmacross. Glad to help you laddy.

Hi James

Thanks for that. I've used it before and thought it the obvious solution to my needs. However, I wanted to check if there wasn't something else I should be considering.

Be sure to give your mom this link: Carrick Gazette, it's a new online newspaper that she might be interestd in.

Give me a shout if you're ever over this way.

Peter