mjmcneese
Veteran
I just finished a project that was shot on an FX1, and edited in FCPHD. My advice to anyone who is thinking about doing this...Don't Do It!!!
Here's what I did...I had to capture the footage using iMovieHD - which sucks. iMovie doesn't 'capture' in realtime. It captures and converts the footage to AIC format in 1/4 realtime. I had 4 hours of tape, so it took more than two days just to capture the footage. No way to log and capture either.
Capturing in iMovieHD gives you an AIC file that's buried in an iMovie Project Package. I moved that over to a media drive, and then imported my 4 hours of HDV into FCP. The cutting part wasn't that bad, after I found the proper settings for the Sequence. So, I get it all cut, do some titles in Photoshop and Livetype in HD resolution. I do all of this with no live monitor. All you have is the canvas window in FCP. Turns out, on scopes the HDV was way dark - only 80% of the brightness that we had when we were shooting. Still don't know what caused this, but some color correction brought it right back to where it was. (BTW, after I finished cutting the client decided that they didn't want to buy a $5000 HD Plasma, so they got an EDTV Plasma, so I didn't even need to cut in HDV anyway...)
So, I have a 'finished' cut. Now, on to DVD. From a 1440x1080 sequence to MPEG2 via Compressor, a 15 minute piece was going to take 20 hours to compress. I didn't have time for that, so I did an output of the sequence to another AIC movie (1 hour). Then I took that movie and converted it to a 720x480 anamorphic AIC movie (3 hours). Then imported that into Compressor and got it out to an MPEG2/Aiff (20 mins). Burned my project in DVDSP3, watched it on TV and...
Suck, the fields were reversed. Couldn't see it on the Canvas monitor, but on an NTSC monitor, it looked like the video was put through a blender. So, back to FCP to figure out where the fields got reversed...it was in my FCP Sequence. So re-render, export, down-rez, and encode, author, and burn the DVD again. Eventually, I got the right formula, and the client was impressed...except for a few changes, of course.
This whole process even sound A LOT easier than it actually was. There was a lot of experimenting. Not to mention the pain of editing 4 hours of footage that isn't logged down to a 15 minute piece. In all, it took me three weeks to get the project out the door - and this is the only thing I've done in those three weeks. I would guess that this edit would have taken no more than 2 days in DV.
I'm not sure how FCPHD5 is going to handle HDV - whether they find a way to edit the native .m2t files, or find a way to do a realtime conversion upon capture to another codec - but, this process sucks.
Here's what I did...I had to capture the footage using iMovieHD - which sucks. iMovie doesn't 'capture' in realtime. It captures and converts the footage to AIC format in 1/4 realtime. I had 4 hours of tape, so it took more than two days just to capture the footage. No way to log and capture either.
Capturing in iMovieHD gives you an AIC file that's buried in an iMovie Project Package. I moved that over to a media drive, and then imported my 4 hours of HDV into FCP. The cutting part wasn't that bad, after I found the proper settings for the Sequence. So, I get it all cut, do some titles in Photoshop and Livetype in HD resolution. I do all of this with no live monitor. All you have is the canvas window in FCP. Turns out, on scopes the HDV was way dark - only 80% of the brightness that we had when we were shooting. Still don't know what caused this, but some color correction brought it right back to where it was. (BTW, after I finished cutting the client decided that they didn't want to buy a $5000 HD Plasma, so they got an EDTV Plasma, so I didn't even need to cut in HDV anyway...)
So, I have a 'finished' cut. Now, on to DVD. From a 1440x1080 sequence to MPEG2 via Compressor, a 15 minute piece was going to take 20 hours to compress. I didn't have time for that, so I did an output of the sequence to another AIC movie (1 hour). Then I took that movie and converted it to a 720x480 anamorphic AIC movie (3 hours). Then imported that into Compressor and got it out to an MPEG2/Aiff (20 mins). Burned my project in DVDSP3, watched it on TV and...
Suck, the fields were reversed. Couldn't see it on the Canvas monitor, but on an NTSC monitor, it looked like the video was put through a blender. So, back to FCP to figure out where the fields got reversed...it was in my FCP Sequence. So re-render, export, down-rez, and encode, author, and burn the DVD again. Eventually, I got the right formula, and the client was impressed...except for a few changes, of course.
This whole process even sound A LOT easier than it actually was. There was a lot of experimenting. Not to mention the pain of editing 4 hours of footage that isn't logged down to a 15 minute piece. In all, it took me three weeks to get the project out the door - and this is the only thing I've done in those three weeks. I would guess that this edit would have taken no more than 2 days in DV.
I'm not sure how FCPHD5 is going to handle HDV - whether they find a way to edit the native .m2t files, or find a way to do a realtime conversion upon capture to another codec - but, this process sucks.
