I find all of this very interesting. Both Apple and Avid were on the JVC stand at IBC last September in force. They were both promising full HDV1 support 'soon' or 'within weeks'. Someone at Avid recently told me that it had been forced lower down the priority scale at the beginning of 2006 because of other more urgent projects. I think it is distinctly fishy that native HDV1 support on AXPro/MC/Symphony and FCP is pretty much identical (30fps only) nearly a year later.

As to Steve's comment about Edius and Liquid leaving AXPro and FCP behind - it's obviously true as far as support for HDV1 media is concerned but I'm not so sure that's either an objective or a sensible viewpoint in general.

I've been testing Liquid for a month. For Avid's target market, it -- with some better documentation -- does damn near anything anyone would want to do with DV and HDV. Including built-in HD DVI output to an HD monitor. I'm blown away!

I'm just starting to test EDIUS 4, but it too looks very, very good. The only thing it is missing is a built DVD creation function that does menus.

Of course, both apps will need to be upgraded to support Bluray burners.

FCP now looks to be no more than a pretty Premiere 6.5.

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That's a scary thought, Steve. But you may be right. The workflow with PP 2.0 and Cineform (or not; I hear you don't even need to have Cineform these days, although I haven't checked it out) is so much easier than FCP. A couple of weeks ago, I was seriously considering getting a core duo MacBook Pro; now I'm starting to check out PCs instead...

Keith, gotta disagree on this. Have you tried to work on substantial (30 minutes or more) amount of footage on Premiere? My experience is that it chokes on HDV (no Cineform, I don't need to buy Cineform for FCP) for anything longer than a few minutes (30 fps). If you add something like Magic Bullet the rendering times can go to a horrendous 45 hours, for 30 minutes, while it takes 3-5 hours on FCP with my old PowerBook G4 1.67Ghz. The Premiere version used a dual Pentium 3.2Ghx with Matrox hardware. We just tested the MacBook Pro dual core and the way FCP renders so many effects in real time, in 1080i, is just amazing.
Sure 24p is not out yet but I'm sure that when it comes out it will be beautiful and the added time in converting with MPEG Streamclip (in batch mode BTW) is much shorter than 45 hours. BTW, the multicamera editing in FCP is fenomenal, way better than the Premiere implementation. We use 2 cameras for every episode of "2nd Unit" and that feature alone would sell me on FCP if I didn't use it already.

Just my $0.02

Well, I certainly agree that both Liquid and Edius have their selling points and Edius, in particular, looks very promising if GVG continue to develop it. However, I wouldn't even consider using Edius or Liquid for serious, long-form cutting. I would argue that they both have a long way to go before they'll tempt me away from Avid AXPro/MC or FCP. Now I'm sure that Edius and Liquid are great for certain uses and I'm not saying they are no good or that they don't have certain obvious advantages - I simply contend that it is midleading to those who are less experienced to suggest those applications are even close to making Avid/FCP redundant for most editors out there. Frankly, I wish it were true because I'd love to jump ship to something like Edius and leave the arrogance of Avid behind but we've tested Edius thoroughly and found it lacking in many respects.

Thanks Antony, as a long-time Canopus user I appreciate your candidness. I'm very interested in what you found to be lacking in Edius. Perhaps you can put that into a new thread in our HD Post category if you're so inclined. Thanks in advance,

Paolo,

Thanks for those insights. I haven't done any long-form editing yet on PP 2.0. We're cutting 18 hours of HD100 footage on FCP right now, and the editing is going smoothly; but getting the footage to where we could edit it was a nightmare. It took about 2.5 hours per hour of footage just to dump it. That's my main concern right now. Have you found any shortcuts?

So, if I'm editing something shot on 24p on FCP, what's the best workaround these days?

I think it is easier to Capture with DVHSCap and then Transcode to HDV 720/30P with a timebase of 23.98 in MPEG STREAMCLIP. It works fine in Final Cut Pro and costs no money. Also, MPEG STREAMCLIP has a great Batch Conform option so you can do every clip at once. Also, In and Out Points can be selected so you don't have to capture excess space.

No shortcuts for 24fcp but basically I acquire the clips via DVRack or HDVxDV or DVHSCap and start the conersion via MPEG Streamclip. as soon as a file is ready I import it in FCP and start analyzing it while the other clips are converting in the background. It's my experience that you have to allocate some time to convert the footage from HDV to some intermediate format anyway.
Premiere doesn't allow you to set the rendering encoder for the sequence, something that I got used to in FCP. In tests that I performed for HDV footage, rendering and exporting using AIC is several times faster than HDV even when FCP can edit the native HDV format (30fps).
For example, exporting a QT reference file, to use in Compressor, takes 1 minute for 30/40 minutes of footage. Using the original HDV clips I was unable to do the same. I stopped FCP when the estimated time was 3 hours. It took me about 1 hour to convert the sequence in AIC and then a minute to export it :)
I love this level of control. I called the Adobe tech support just to verify that I didn't miss anything and they confirmed that Premiere doesn't allows you to alter the codec used for rendering :(

Paolo, to be sure I understand what you are trying to say here... you mean that PPro does not let you work with a lower sampled version of the encoded file for editing...? Or you mean directly that when encoding/digitizing to HDV for edit you have no options/settings for the HDV format that they provide? If the last statment is closer to what you mean then this is also why many of us have invested in the Aspect HD method for encoding (even still, not without it's trade-offs, it's a blessed curse).

Long form editing can be done with PPro 2 but don't expect to do so without something like Aspect HD (theres that A word again). We might see better native HDV support from Adobe around the time FCP gets 24P editing native. ;)

Have you tried to use Liquid in long form? I, like Chris with Edius, have many years experience with Liquid and long form projects and very complex timelines. Please tell about your hands on experience with these products. Where were these products lacking? We cut on Media Composer Adrenalin, FCP and Liquid. Liquid and MCA get used most. Liquid gets HD duty and MCG gets SD duty.

In FCP I can have a sequence with HDV for input and then I can select whatever codec I want for the rendering. Each codec has pros/cons. AIC is what I use the most because is fast at rendering and preserves quality nicely. HDV, as we know, is not designed to be an editing codec. Apple and Adobe and others have worked around the GOP problem but it's still harder and more processor intensive than transcoding to something like AIC.
The Cineform codec is fine but it costs as much as another copy of FCP. If I buy a professional NLE I expect that NLE to give me reasonable support for the current formats.
We just bought a MacBookPro + FCP and we got our out-of-the-box-HD-editing-station without adding anything else. Turn on the machine, install the software, edit. No add-on cards, no nonsense. I like that :)

BTW, just to be clear, FCP had 24p editing for a while, it just doesn't have HDV 24fps editing and acquisition. Exactly because of the many options of codecs supported for edting and rendering, it's very easy to edit 24fps footage. You just have to work a bit for the "ingestion" phase :)

Hope this helps.

Actually I think the best frame rate to enter in MPEGStreamclip is 23.976. This will continue to export "real" frames over a couple of cuts whereas 23.98 often slips into 1/2 the frame rate.

Once I found that MPEGStreamclip could do batch exporting, I've stopped being so frustrated w/ the 24p workflow with FCP. There is an extra step (transcoding), but it's not so bad for a free option. I'm looking forward to the Apple solution, though. Just to clarify, they're going to make it so that it skips the repeated frames, right? Just making sure. There's no reason to import 60 frames/sec when you only want 24.