Follow-up questions based on your advice for URGENT need to shoot P2 this Sunday

filmtovideo

filmtovideo

Well-known member
Thanks for all the advice!


I have to do this shoot Sunday because the actors will be unavailable thereafter for quite a long time.
However, it's simple lighting of a conversation in one room and only a couple of pages so probably
the best situation if I use the camera to send the P2 data through Firewire to the new Lacie hard drive
I got yesterday.

DVCPRO 50 sounds good. Longer record times and good quality, plus possibility for variable frame rates.
However, I've heard that stuff shot in HD looks better when converted to SD than anything shot in
SD (with of course good lighting, camera, etc.)

Is that accurate? Is it better to shoot HD even to make an (ultimately) SD product look better?

There is a possibility of this being projected at festivals, as it will be submitted, but projected digitally.
We're certainly never going to film out. Would shooting HD help here and how so?

This would be my first time editing HD in Final Cut Pro. Is there anything I need to know about
shooting 720P 24N as opposed to one of the 24P over 60 modes? 24N sounds great and I'd like
to do it and I've read that the quality is superior to other 24 modes but what should I know before
I commit?

I have a MacBookPro which won't accept P2 cards and runs Final Cut Express so I can't capture
the 720P 24 HD footage with it. (The Final Cut Pro system that I can use is in a room and not portable.)

I bought the Lacie so I won't be spending any more money this week. I have to learn how to play
the P2 footage from the camera to the hard drive, how to format the hard drive, how to verify
that the clips have been captured (verifying adds more time to this I understand) and then how to
"erase" (is that right?) the P2 card. I'm doing a lot of preproduction and certainly don't want to be in
this multi hat position again but these things seem possible to learn in order to get this shoot
accomplished. Anything special you can clue me into as I test today?

THANKS!
 
If your project is destine for an SD delivery vehicle (like a DVD) then shoot in DVCPro 50 mode. Shooting in HD and then converting to SD later will not achieve any better quality (though there is a potential for a slightly exaggerated sharpness effect to occur during the conversion) than shooting 4:2:2 SD to begin with. If you think that you can actually make use of HD footage all the way through to viewing, then shoot 720p, but if it is going to end up SD, shoot SD.
 
i never quite agree with, mastering to SD then shoot to SD mindset, but maybe i don't understand it. I mean, shooting film and then downrezzing to SD still looks better than shooting SD. and in my eyes, shooting HD and downrezzing to SD looks better, i mean you have more pixel information. can someone explain khmuse's and other people's reasoning.


as far as offloading to a hard drive, we are doign a shooti this weekend and doing exactly that. All you have to do is plug in the HDD to the camera with a 4pin to 6 pin firewire cable, and go into the MCR menu. they hit the thumbnail button to be able to get to the menu and go to other operations and make sure 1394 host is selected. then hold the media button down to go into dub, format the HDD with the camera and wowla, you can copy the contents of the P2 card to the hard drive.

you can't record directly to HDD though.
 
But we're not shooting film. Film looks better for reasons that have nothing to do with resolution.

As for downrezzing to SD looking "better", that just isn't so on the HVX. It's already internally shooting HD and downrezzing to SD, so if there's benefit to be had, you're already getting it. If you go recording in HD on the HVX and then downrezzing it, the results are softer than if you'd just recorded DV50 in the first place.

You can either image 1920x1080 and downconvert to extremely-mildly-compressed DV50, or you can image 1920x1080 and downconvert to 960x720 at twice the compression, and then uncompress that and downconvert again to 720x480 and compress again. Which do you think will give the better results? According to my testing, the first method just plain looks better.
 
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