first "real" shoot with HVX - lots of ?s

J

janao

New member
I have owned the HVX200 for close to a year now. I have played around with it and feel fairly comfortable with it at this point.

I am producing a series of DVD's for babies and have a shoot scheduled for the week of Oct.22nd. It's a three day shoot on a stage with crew, talent and the works. I sill have some questions about the workflow and other issues that are keeping me up at night!

I plan to shoot @ 1080/30p with a FS100. I do not want to have to deal with any interlacing in my footage. I have a MacBook Pro and a MacPro 2x3. I also have a 1TB fibre channel raid array with my MacPro. Should I bring the MacBook or the MacPro to the shoot to load footage onto if the FS100 fills up? The MacPro has FCP. The MacBook does not. I also have 1 16GB P2 card. I have not worked with it, however, so I am a little less comforable with it.

The final shows will be put on DVD for distribution. Are there any issues with the format I am planning to shoot at that I am unaware of in regards to going to DVD?

My bkg is in visual effects, animation and graphics. Quite a bit of the content (70%) is going to be created with various graphics programs. I have done some tests in AE using the DVCpro HD settings. My graphics don't look as clean as when I use a regular HDTV setting (square pixels). The edges of the graphics get very pixelated using DVCPRO HD. What is up with that?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Jana
 
DVD is only 480, so shooting at 1080 may be overkill.
The experts here will be able to guide you better though.
 
Initially, I plan to offer the shows on regular DVD but am mastering the shows to HD 1080 for future products. Should have made that clarification. : )
 
Hiya,

In after effects you are working at 1080p its based on a setting of 1280x1080 DVCPRO HD for 60Hz camera footage - this is an anamorphic picture [non square pixels].

When you are working in the canvas you should have the aspect ratio button clicked off for preview. This is because aftereffects is crap at simulating the anamorphic picture stretched out to the full 1920 x 1080. Instead work in the original aspect ratio and when it comes to rendering aftereffects can render a much better image than simulating. But when output back out to the 16x9 aspect ratio they will be the right size.

If you can output the footage as uncompressed quicktime footage unless the program is too long. As you have the master footage you can easily render out a high quality one later on.

Apologies if you already have this set. I try to keep anything from aftereffects as high quality as possible and render down to what I need later.

Hope that helps.

Kind regards,
Richard
 
720p is a nice compromise format that is both versatile and efficient to shoot with plenty of Post Prod flexibility for future proofing your project.
 
I've actually worked with babies in the past for DVD content ( a la "Baby Einstein") and found using wide angle adapters extremely helpful. Allows me to obtain greater dof and decrease close focus distance allowing me to get closer to the babies and objects, fwiw.

If you are adding FX you may want to consider shooting DVC Pro50 because of it's lower compression. Besides, you're finishing in NTSC.
 
If you think you might fill up more than 100GB in a day's shoot, then bring another drive. In 1080p30 that would be about 100 minutes. Or if you compromise to 720pN24 you can get about 250 minutes.
It's nice to be comfortable with the P2 cards, since you can use them without worrying about batteries or big clunky attachments.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top