Exporting final project shot on XH-A1

[sharky]

I know this may be a final cut question,
but I figure since you guys have this camera, you would (hopefully) know the answer to my dilemma. I shot a full length feature doc on the xh-A1, which came out beautifully. I edited it on my macbook pro and now I want to do an output to tape, HD cam or digibeta. The question is, what is the best codec to do this in? (I brought all my footage in, in the HDV codec. Should I convert it to Apple Intermediate Codec? One thing for certain is, I'm having no luck doing a final cut to tape output back to the canon. Any suggestion/ solutions will be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

Keith

p.s. The output to the xh-A1 was just a test, like I said, I want to eventually go to HD cam, thanks!

 

[Nektonic]

You can export a master using any of the following codecs (there are more options, but these seem to be the most common:

--HDV
--AIC
--ProRes
--DVCPRO HD (I haven't tried this one yet)

Personally, I have found that AIC makes my footage look a bit darker than normal, while HDV has looked exactly the same, however, a project I recently exported as HDV looked washed out in the Quicktime player compared to the timeline playback. I think it is the Quicktime player not playing back an accurate representation of my file. That is my theory at least.

From my experience, exporting an HDV project to a ProRes master doesn't look any better, nor any worse. It is a much larger (like 3x) file than an HDV master. The advantage of course is that if you are going to take it to a post house for color grading then I would image they would want it in a format that can hold up better than HDV. Basically 4:2:0 HDV is not as good for grading than 4:2:2 ProRes.

If I were in your shoes, I would export a 5 minute section of your project in all the codecs you are considering and do a comparison. That way you can compare quality and file size to see what the best overall option is. I would also consult with whoever is going to do your HDcam transfer.