Latest version of Lumiere HD supports the Canon XL-H1

[Nathyn]

Did we all forget about Lumiere HD. The new LHD works with the Canon (I'm assuming 24f). You can't print back to tape but I don't see any reason why you can't turn the footage into a stand alone fulll quality quicktime movie, put it on the timeline and print it to tape.

-Nate

 

[Nathyn]

I take it this isn't as big as I thought it would be or someone else has mentioned this.

-Nate

 

[Elton]

Lumiere's nice because it can make for a useable offline workflow. It will be superceded when FCP 6 comes out though.

The idea of Lumiere HD is that it captures your HDV and generates XML code that allows you to transcode to any QT codec you choose (DVCPRO HD, DV, PhotoJPEG, AIC, UC, etc.) and then when your final edit is ready it will conform your orginal HDV clips to a native timeline and allow you to render a final output either to tape or QT file. (24F to tape isn't supported yet, apparently)

The way I would use it would be to transcode to DVCProHD, AIC or PhotoJPEG, edit, and reconform to an HDV timeline.

Then you change the timeline codec to uncompressed, Sheer (my fave) or maybe CineForm in the future. You do a final render in a much better codec and then create distribution MPEG 4 (h.264) or WMV's.

This preserves a little more quality but honestly, the MPEG Streamclip to FCP route works fine and codecs like PhotoJPEG are nearly lossless and work quite well as a final intermediate that you would encode distribution to.