Along the lines of framserving - why not export still targa sequence?
 

Hi...

Just running a bit of an experiment and can report on this when the render finishes tomorrow:

I'm doing a big HDV render in Premiere Pro with Magic Bullet looks and because I'm staying at HDV resolution, the render is taking forever...

as per when I do renders in Lightwave, I've decided to export my video as a still-frame targa sequence in case my computer craps out during the next 20 hours... that way, I can pick up where it left off and not have to hope I get through the whole render without some sort of glitch...

any thoughts on exporting "render-intensive" (ie. color-corrected, major effects) HDV as a still frame sequence instead?

What I like about this idea is suddenly Photopshop becomes a really cool app to stylize your HDV look - there are waaaay more filters/effects you can apply as a "macro" in photoshop to automate and batch process a sequence of still targas...

Anybody else try this? You'd then pull the still frame sequence as a sequence back in to your NLE, trash the video part and it should match up with the audio. Then, voila, framserve still-targa sequence with audio in NLE timeline out to say Nero Recode and make a high-quality mpeg4 to use as source for SD DVD, etc...

Okay, will report tomorrow...

Very interesting idea. I'm not doing HD, but I've dealt with image sequences quite a bit (raytraced animations). 'Never thought of using Photoshop for video like that (though I did use a similar app for hand-drawn lightsabers once -- very tedious).

I'm curious: how much extra hard drive space do you have? I could see this taking up a lot (especially targas). My experience is that targas work well for animations (lots of solid colors), but once you try it with video (where each pixel is just slightly different than the next), the compression level hits the floor (basically equivalent with bitmap). Recently I tried TIF with a fair amount of success. Let us know how it goes!

I can also relate to long frameserves -- an 85-hour MPEG2 encode is my record (and that was in SD!).

Jeremy, you're right - a lot of space required...
 

I rendered out uncompressed targas (24 bit) at 1440 x 1080 each and sure enough, my 4:23 (min:sec) m2t became 32 GB...!!!

But then I brought the sequence back in to Vegas and frameserved the "avi" out to Nero Recode to make an mpeg4 at 1080 resolution - it looks freakin' awesome! Of course, when I exported the targas, I deinterlaced and when I brought back the sequence into NLE, I changed the timeline to "progressive"...

It's a very nice, filmic-effect to the final mp4 render and on the computer monitor, you really appreciate the advantage of 1080i, 25 mbs... ha ha - that is a bit of an injoke based on various posts around the threads here of late...

My Magic Bullet full HDV render was gonna take forever and sure enough, I had space issues - it meant when I got home I had to render the last 20% and it took 5 hrs. instead of starting over from scratch and having to try to get a non-stop render of 20 plus hours...

Now with photoshop etc. it's very possible to suddenly do a Linklater type animation based on HDV source material...

Interesting...