H.264 > HDV Conversion / Acquisition

[Dennis St. John]

I recently hired out for a video project due to being double booked and the professional I hired out to did not deliver raw footage from the cameras (I assumed he would), rather delivered the footage pre-ingested into Apple FCPX. I personally still use Apple FCP 7 and typically ingest from my Sony HVR-Z7U in HDV straight into Final Cut from the CF cards. The footage he delivered reads in FCP as 1920x1080 frame size and H.264 as the Compressor. I would like to convert this footage to HDV (my preferred editing codec) (via FCP's batch export) but it is taking FOREVER... about 24+ hours for a 1 hour clip. I have also tried doing this with Adobe Media Encoder (I am slowly but surely migrating to Adobe) but still having the same problem. Is there a better way I should be doing this? I have about 5 hours worth of footage to convert which would take about 5 days which I think is pretty outrageous. Any help or light anyone can shed here would be immensely appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[Jack Zhang]

ProRes HQ is my intermediate codec of choice for FCP. If you re-compress to HDV, it will look worse than the source because of HDV's MPEG-2 compression.

[Arnie Schlissel]

Originally Posted by Jack Zhang

ProRes HQ is my intermediate codec of choice for FCP. If you re-compress to HDV, it will look worse than the source because of HDV's MPEG-2 compression.

No need for ProRes HQ, you can use ProRes "plain vanilla" or ProRes LT. h264 is an 8 bit 4:2:0 type of codec and there isn't enough information preserved in it to warrant the larger file size of HQ.