Thanks Frederic, that's good to know.
Any idea if I'm correct on the DVHS question? I would LOVE to be able to use Lumiere to move my DVCPRO HD stuff to DVHS, but you first have to add pull-down in After-Effects right now, FCP's pull-down just doesn't cut it.

I assume you shot your Varicam footage in 24p (prob a good assumption) and you'd like to archive it to DVHS in 60i...

Doesn't Panasonic have a FCP plugin to play with framerate? You should try that and convert the DVCPRO HD first to 60p then generate a QT 1440 X 1080 and use Lumiere HD to make a DVHS friendly 1080i.

I think...

Frederic

I'm on the wagon that says, do not convert unless you have to. Keep it HDV in edit and the publish back out to tape. If you have to convert it to intercut somwhere else then OK, otherwise keep it native if possible.

I realize there are many ways to skin the cat though....

I'm not sure I agree. I don't have the camera yet, but in playing with the posted m2t files in Final Cut, neither the 25 mbs or the 19mbs hdv codecs handle color correction and other post processing very well.

while I'm no expert, instinctually the idea of editing on a GOP codec seems very very wrong as various changes you implement might show up on a deltaframe versus a keyframe and some blackbox implementaion is going to make everything right again.

I'm quite willing to be educated and corrected. I understand that the idea of generation loss is to be avoided but my reluctance to edit in a gop codec seems to be emotionally stronger.

-ed

I'm on a different toolset (Liquid 6.1) which is designed specifically for HDV workflow. There is another thread or two here where I've done extensive color corrections on HDV and provided example's. Anyway, as I wrote, there are other ways. To me native (if you have the toolset in place) is the way to go.

FCP 5.0 Best Native HDV Editing
 

The best solution for editing HDV native (not 24p & 25p) is FCP 5.0

Read the article on HDV in Film & Video magazine Oct issue.

Paul Saccone (Product Manager for Final Cut Studio) says: "If you take an HDV stream, whether you're doing color-correction or a 16-layer composite, we decompress all that video into a 4:4:4 color space, do our composites, and then do one single re-encode back down to HDV format. So you're only, ever, incurring one generation of re-encoding."

As does Liquid 6, which works in uncompressed RGB, 2VUY or MPEG2 I frame for edits to the GOP and effects (your choice). B.T.W. now the same for Avid XpressPro.