downconvert project to hdv-- crazy?

T

tchandler

Member
so, i've got about 1.2TB of 720p 59.94 footage. i'm using raylight and fcp to cut. i have regular access to a super nice desktop system, but would like to do most of the logging and rough cutting on my laptop with a small bus-powered fw800 drive.

my thought is to use media manager to recompress the entire project to hdv (keeping file names intact), keep the hd project on the desktop system. this way i can log and rough out some sequences on the laptop. once i start fine cutting, rendering, etc, i'll go back to the desktop, bring the project file, and just reconnect to the HD media.

in theory, this seems like a good idea. i've done some tests, and because file names remain unchanged , reconnecting the media has been working seamlessly. anyone have experience doing this? thoughts? am i just asking for trouble?

thanks,
todd
 
tchandler said:
in theory, this seems like a good idea.
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In theory, yes. But in practice, HDV is only an acquisition format and not an editing format because of the long GOP. Even those who shoot on HDV must convert the footage to AIC or ProRes upon capture.

Now, this isn't to say that you aren't on the right track. You're talking about an offline edit, which is an industry standard process. Convert the footage to SD... use the DV codec, as the storage required for that will fit your system. You can then do your offline edit, and bring it back in later for the online with the full-rez HD footage.
 
thanks c2v.
i'm familiar with the offline edit process, but in this case i thought to recompress to hdv because it seems to result smaller files than SD.

i thought fcp 6 could edit native hdv. when i've done test recompresses, fcp creates an hdv project and i'm able to open, view footage, work in a sequence, etc. as i'm only going to be logging and rough cutting there will be no effects/rendering involved...so i'm not sure why it would be a problem. but, i also don't understand what a long GOP is, so i might be missing something.
 
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Long Group Of Pictures. In HDV, a frame isn't really a frame in the traditional sense. The files in HDV are the same sie as standard-def DV. To fit an HD image in the same space, they came up with a way of breaking the picture up. So a single "frame" of HDV actually contains pieces and parts of multiple images. Upon conversion to AIC or ProRes, the long GOP is extracted and the traditional frames are reassembled.
 
thanks, that makes sense.

recompressing at SD is giving me about 1/2 the file size of my HD project. is there anything between the near-unwatchable offlineRT and SD that i might consider that would save a little more space (trying to get down to below 400gb)?
 
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tchandler said:
thanks, that makes sense.

recompressing at SD is giving me about 1/2 the file size of my HD project. is there anything between the near-unwatchable offlineRT and SD that i might consider?
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Not really. In all my days working with AVID offline, the offline capture from DBeta was nasty, but it worked. I would consider that codec nearly unwatchable as well, considering I had to use the offline edit to start audio post in ProTools. Would have been better if they'd used the DV codec.

But a 50% reduction in storage needs is still considerable. Just depends on how much FW800 storage you have/can afford at this point.

I've never really heard of folks using offlineRT. For one, offlining is a waste of time when shooting DV. And the DV codec serves as a nicely viewable offline compression for other formats.
 
okay thanks.

i think i'm actually going to give offline rt a shot, but just customize a preset with a larger frame size. for now my priority is simply logging this material offline (in this case, material that's already in the project, but i need to comb through and add descriptions, log notes, takes, etc...right in fcp), and all the cutting can be done online.
 
tchandler said:
okay thanks.

i think i'm actually going to give offline rt a shot, but just customize a preset with a larger frame size. for now my priority is simply logging this material offline (in this case, material that's already in the project, but i need to comb through and add descriptions, log notes, takes, etc...right in fcp), and all the cutting can be done online.
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IIRC Photo-JPEG, the codec used by FCP's Offline RT function, only is 'blessed' when using the settings in the presets. If you roll your own Photo-JPEG settings you won't get any RT benefits so everything will need to be rendered.


-A
 
good to know.
what i'm going for at the moment is not the RT aspect, but just file size. i need to log the clips that's in the project beyond the user clip name that came over from p2 metadata (ie: enter info in the description, scene, log note fields). that's all i really want to do with this offline version of the project. i just need to have a lo-res, but viewable version of the project (with no sequences) to do this.
 
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