Offline SD edit of HD footage

overnighttolondon

overnighttolondon

Well-known member
What would you guys suggest in terms of workflow for the following situation:

I'm doing a short that's going to be mostly a long series of still frames shot 5/sec on the Canon EOS 30D, shooting at 1Megapixel let's say. I'll take them off the card and just treat them like an image sequence.

Thing is, my computer can't handle HD editing very well. I want to do an SD edit in Premiere, then replace the footage and export 720p. Any ideas?

One way I thought of would be to make copies of all of my images at SD and HD resolutions (just duplicate the image sequences in two folders). Then, I could replace the footage when I'm done editing. Even though I'd still be working in an SD project, and my HD images would overhang the edges of the frame, Adobe Media Encoder lets you export stuff that's beyond the edges of the frame if you set the export dimensions larger without stretching to fit.

This seems like a sketchy workaround. Is there something built into Premiere Pro 2.0 (that's what Im' using by the way) that lets you do this kind of draft edit and then automatedly use that for your HD master?
 
How about exporting an EDL from my SD project and importing it into my HD project? Do you think that would work?

Anyone have any ideas?
 
Have you considered resizing the images before loading them into Premiere? Or do you want to do a pan/zoom type effect? I'm sure Premiere would perform better if it didn't have to do the resize itself plus you get more. With Photoshop you could automate the entire image sequence pretty quickly. I have zero experience with EDL so I can't help you there.

-Dan
 
Alright, so let's say I want to try working in HD from the start, 720 24p (does anyone know why there's only an option for 720 60p via the HD SDI presets, not 24p... or am I not getting something..?).

And let's also say I don't have one of those rippin' expensive Xena cards. Has anyone had good experiences with third party codecs, like Avid's or somethign like that? Is anyone using 2.0 for HD yet?
 
I'm using PPro 2.0 for HDV editing right now. I have a 3.0gHZ P4, 2.5 gigs of RAM, a 128mb nVidia geForce fx5200 card and that seems to be about the minimum required to realistically work with hdv. Better, might be a dual core and a 256mb card....
But I also wanted to know this... How DO you edit in sd from hs video? Do you just capture the hdv..then export it as SD, edit that, create an EDL then use that?

I've just been editing naitively and seems to work fine for me, but what if my computer couldn't handle it like the first post was saying?
 
reflex said:
But I also wanted to know this... How DO you edit in sd from hs video? Do you just capture the hdv..then export it as SD, edit that, create an EDL then use that?
Click to expand...

In general, that's the idea. EDLs are a bit annoying cause you can only have one video track and they're kind of temperamental in other ways too.

I'm in a bit of a weird situation cause I'm shooting on a digital SLR (the Canon EOS 30D can do 5fps continuous) for a really stilted effect. My plan would basically be to either create two sets of still sequences (batch the resize in Photoshop), or else scale everything down to 40% in my SD edit, then export the EDL, then import into an HD project, then use paste attributes to scale back up...

No matter how I do it it's going to be clumsy I think, this seems like exactly the kind of thing you'd want an automated process for. I don't need to see my full resolution when I'm editing for the most part. Maybe there is / will be a plugin of some kind?
 
A couple of things you can try. Please keep in mind that HD editing is new for everyone so there's not a "right" way of doing anything yet.

If you purchased the Adobe Video Suite, which included Bridge, I believe this might work. One of the cool things about Bridge is that you can do mundane tasks like re-naming or "scaling" an entire folder of clips easily. Take your HD clips and re-scale them to standard definition in Bridge into a new folder, make sure to keep the names the same. Edit from the SD folder, when complete close PPro, move the SD folder [don't delete yet] and open a new HD project [with the same settings as your SD project, frame rate, progressive etc.. but now HD]. Import your SD sequence and when PPro promp's you becuase it can't find the footage you have moved, point it to the HD folder of the same name.

I know this part works however, something you should keep in mind, I'm not sure whether PPro's motion vectors are based on pixles or percentages. If it is pxel specific then any panning and scanning you did in SD would be different when applied to HD. If it is a percentage of the image then the motion patameters will be applied correctly to the HD footage. This too is easy to test.

I do a lot of motion on stills and generally start out with images as large as 10Kx10K, but add the motion in AE.

Good luck and let us know how you accomplish this.
 
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Hey guys. Wow, I can't believe I didn't think of importing the SD prproj into the HD one. shadow24 just suggested a similar workflow via PM. I guess I had floating in my head that you couldnt' mix resolutions like that, but it works great.

Yeah, I've got the suite, so I'll use bridge. But for others who don't have it, you can still accomplish the scaling thing with Photoshop Actions. I think I'm going to use PS in batch mode for some of my effects and colour correction.

I'd guess the motion is in pixels, but I haven't tested it yet. I'll keep you guys updated on what we do
 
Ok, is there something completely obvious that I'm just overlooking here?

I want a project that's 720p and 23.976 fps. The HDV 720p only does 25p and 30p, and the Adobe HD-SDI only does 60p when you're at 720p.

Am I just missing something? Where's my 720/24p?
 
Update: got the Aspect HD demo (15-day no watermark, really nice of them), it's working great. My system's not even that good, P4 2.4 with HT, 1Gb ram, SATA but no RAID... and it's letting me edit pretty smoothly, I don't think I'm going to bother with teh SD offline.
 
Well done! Enjoyed the story and presentation! Pretty cool stuff with that EOS and nice to know the cineform solution worked. That's probably going to be my next investment for HD workflow w/ PP2.0...

Good luck with the entry - scores well from my view :)!
 
Thanks dewman. We're in the top 30, we just have to wait now to see if we catch the top 6 and get flown all-expenses paid to India (it's for a Microsoft competition, and, as you can imagine, they're loaded)...
 
Very well done. I'm one of those people who feel there is alway room for improvement, which almost always makes me sound negative but that's not my intention. :furious3:

The look, music, locations lighting and story are all great. It appears that some of the camera shake was done in post, if so, the only suggestion I would make would be to change the motion key frames from linear to bezier (sp?) to make it look a bit more natural.

I very much enjoyed your short, congratulation. :love4:

P.S doesn't AspectHD rock... And they just released support for the HVX :)
 
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