Record in HD and capture in SD/DV?
 

Hi,

I've been researching a lot about HD and I've seen some very impresive footage (specialy when combined with a 35mm adapter). I'm plannng to hop on the Hd wagon very soon, but being new to this format and having a limited budget, I'd like to know the following:

Is it possible to record in HD and then capture the HD footage to your pc as if it were DV? (for editing purposes)

I know, I know. Everybory must be saying "what is the point of recording in HD then?". The thing is that I don't have a powerful enough pc (YET!) but I'd like to benefit from the amazing qualities of HD. I've seen many examples of people who shot on HD+35mm adapter and then converted it to DV, since the final distribuition would be made in that format...and the results are amazing. I've been working with SD/DV for a long time and I think it's time to move on...which means I won't be investing on a SD/DV camera that will become obsolete in a not very distant future.

Certainly the Sony HDV cameras will allow you to downconvert to SD on the fly as you capture the material into your computor - I should expect the other manufacturers' cameras would allow this as well.
One thing though, I don't believe that downconverted HDV (via camera) looks any better than material shot as straight DV. We've made a number of tests at BBC Wales and don't really see the advantage, apart from "future-proofing" as it were, with your master footage in the bank, ready for when you can edit HDV.

Robin

As Robin says, this is a no-brainer on the Sony cameras. You just enable "i.Link Downconvert" from the menu and your computer will see the camera as an SD DV device. Personally I can see a slight quality increase in areas of fine detail on footage shot this way. I just shot about 6 hours of performance footage in HDV and am going to capture as DV so I'll take a closer look at this soon.

One downside however is that you'll need to use the camera itself to capture the footage (unless you also own an HDV deck which costs as much as another camera).

thanks, guys. very helpful. one more thing...I've been hearing so much FX1 bashing, but at the same time I hear so many good things about it. The footage I've seen shot with a 35mm are simply breath taking. My main fear is what I hear about the way the FX1 deals with camera movements (artifacts, tape drops, etc)...I read about these problems in reviews but not once have I read it from sombody who actuañy uses the FX1 on a daily basis.

Any FX1 users on the house care to coment?

Rafael,
I use my FX1 almost daily for broadcast work (in SD, since we haven't had the go ahead on HDV yet) and I've had no problems at all - in fact, I've been complimented on the quality of images that I deliver... (and many of those have been in quite lowlight areas with gain in.)
You'd be hard pressed to see the difference between this camera and the DSR570 that we use as well.
I just love using it because of it's small footprint. I can get it into spaces that I just wouldn't want to take a bigger camera.
We did a drama shoot a few weeks ago with three Z1's clamped to a car on a low-loader, where we would have normally used one Digibeta (and multiple setups.) Everyone thought that the pictures were remarkable.

Robin

Forgive my ignorance but why 3 cameras shooting the same thing? What's the purpose or fix that you're doing in post that would require this?

Miguel