HMC150 Wedding Same-Day-Edits

D

DNathan

Well-known member
I never attempted more than a simple SDE while using film, but I'm interested to hear if a linear edit is possible through the clip management of the 150. Being multicam, our ceremonies have to be one clip. Is it possible to pull out, say, the kiss and plop it after some Love Story footage I'd filmed before the wedding?

I want to take edited Love Story footage, put it on a card, and add selected wedding-day footage on the end. Then I want to plug the camera into our projector and bypass our laptop. The DJ would play a song (unsyncopated). Possible?
 
In all honesty, I am not sure the HMC150 would be the best choice for you if you are interested in offering SDE services to your wedding clients. The reason I say this is because of the difficult editing workflow that AVCHD is known for.

I can only assume that you would be looking to edit the video footage on a laptop for the SDE? If that's the case, you will need a laptop with some raw power in order to natively edit the AVCHD footage, granted you are shooting the wedding in PH mode for maximum quality, and not any of the other lower bit-rate modes. If you did choose to shoot in HA, HG, HE modes then you could get away with a less powerful editing platform at the cost of quality.

Another issue for SDE consideration is transcoding footage recorded in PH mode. If you chose this mode and you were editing with a laptop, it would be seriously beneficial for you to transcode the footage to DVCProHD using the MainConcept transcoder, or some other video footage conversion utility like Procoder 3. Of course transcoding requires time and that is something you don't have with SDE.

The second question you asked I believe was whether or not you can take some footage you shot with the 150, edit it together, drop it onto the SD card and use the camera to play the footage back. Well, the following post talks about the same question asked by another member, and the answer is, it is possible, but again will require time that you may not have:

http://dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=154345
 
That's an interesting idea.

I think I would go ahead and try doing it with your laptop.

Have the regular love story ready to be played, as a backup.

Then make another sequence that is prepared for the SDE footage. Do any titles or music work ahead of time. Get a good idea of what shots you want and where you want them. Get the whole thing in your head.

If you're shooting preparations then dump & transcode that footage while you're shooting the ceremony. Then just pull the few important shots from the ceremony and transcode them after the ceremony. Combine the ceremony with the prep and you should have a pretty awesome ending for your love story.

I think it would be really neat if you didn't tell your couple about the SDE (assuming you're doing the SDE for free, as a test). Talk about a great testomial! Make sure you record the couples reaction to your video!

I've never attempted a SDE before but I'm going to try really soon, thanks to the HMC-150.
 
digitalcapturegroup said:
In all honesty, I am not sure the HMC150 would be the best choice for you if you are interested in offering SDE services to your wedding clients. The reason I say this is because of the difficult editing workflow that AVCHD is known for.
Click to expand...

I've actually found that it is still slightly faster to transfer the footage then transcode using Neo Scene than it is to capture MiniDV real time.

But with Quad Core laptops (and Windows 7) starting to arrive on the market, I believe that the HMC will really become a good camera for SDE's.
 
We have attempeted some SDEs with AVCHD, but it takes more time since we have to transcode the clips in Edius. It's not too big of a deal working with prep footage or even recption footage for a SDE. The biggest problem has been the ceremony.

Typically for the ceremony, our tape workflow has been to capture the key segments from the ceremony from two cameras. It doesn't really take too long. The problem with transcoding AVCHD to Edius is that if the ceremony is 30 minutes long, it takes about 90 minutes to trancode, even though we only need about a minute of the footage from the ceremony. :(

I can see where Vegas would have a big advantage over Edius when editing on a laptop for a SDE. If there was just some way I could only transcode a portion of the ceremony in Edius it would solve my problem for SDEs.
 
When using Final Cut Pro, the HMC150 proves to be very well suited to SDEs due to the fact that you can pluck out specific points of each clip and not have to transcode the whole thing. As long as you have a fast SDHC card and a fast reader, you can skim through the clips and mark just the media you need to quickly import the clips for the video.

A great improvement over tape IMHO.
 
Yeah, I totally agree with Mike Shu.. He actually helped me make this SDE 2 weeks ago.. It was SOOOOOOO much eaiser than tape. You mark IO points and my MacBookPro chewed that stuff right up. Fast. Even on longer clips, like the vows, I was able to log more clips as well and edit. Normal tape, your stuck, unless you import through imovie and edit in FCP. THere's a trick for ya all..

Check it out..

http://impressivecreations.blogspot.com/2009/03/same-day-edit-blue-bird.html
 
"The problem with transcoding AVCHD to Edius is that if the ceremony is 30 minutes long, it takes about 90 minutes to trancode, even though we only need about a minute of the footage from the ceremony. :("

What are you using to transcode? For me I found it takes 5 minutes to transcode 10 minutes of avchd footage.
 
error

error

I downloaded the latest AVCHDtoHQ converter from edius and yes its faster when converting 1 file by utilizing all the cores of the CPU. Just one problem encountered is that when you batch convert 2 or more .mts files that was split due to the 4 gig limit of fat32, the progrem will notify an error, it says there that files have the same file name so it will rename the 2 or more files as 0001.mts + 0002.mts and bla bla bla and the converted file will form a single file. I though at the begining it was really an error but after converting it actually joins 2 or more files together split by the 4 gig limit
 
DNathan said:
I never attempted more than a simple SDE while using film, but I'm interested to hear if a linear edit is possible through the clip management of the 150. Being multicam, our ceremonies have to be one clip. Is it possible to pull out, say, the kiss and plop it after some Love Story footage I'd filmed before the wedding?

I want to take edited Love Story footage, put it on a card, and add selected wedding-day footage on the end. Then I want to plug the camera into our projector and bypass our laptop. The DJ would play a song (unsyncopated). Possible?
Click to expand...

That shouldn't be possible based on the file structure of avchd on the card. You can't add clips to a card that didn't create them because all the small text files and what not that reference the clips won't have mention of it in them.

I don't think what you want can be done unless your able to throw that into your editor too before going back to card.
 
Last edited:
It does sound like I'll need my laptop, but that will afford me the chance to use slo-mo, etc. I really like the idea of producing a stunning love story, then finishing it off with same-day stuff. I can even have an original ending that I replace with same day stuff as time allows. That way if things get hairy I won't need to stress!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top