Long Conference Shooting!

Lumiere

Well-known member
I have a project which will last 30 days.Everyday i'll shoot a conference for 4 hours witout stopping.I'll shoot in tape mode with hvx probably dv25,but i am planning to record it to Firestore.
1-My question is which file type would be right choice?Avi type 1-2? or quictime?
(After shooting finished i'll transfer the footages to dvd))

2-I am scared of firestore can cause some strange problems with recording 4 hours non-stop recording?Or just a stop/start few times.Do you think firestore can handle this?

Thanks
 
the firestore has a fat32 file format so in dv25 mode i think the files will be in 9 minute configs if i'm not mistaken.

if you're a mac user i'd go to quicktime, but not sure about PC.

i've shot plenty of very long hard drive filling shoots, no problems.
 
ı am a pc user.My plan was to shoot .avi and just transfer it to pc and burn dvd,cause evryday 4 hours to render and export will cause me a huge time loss.mxf sounds logical but don't want because of this reason,actually i can just drag and drop to premier and then send it to adoobe encore to burn dvd.I scared what if my client asks me about the original footage at the end?I can not give them mxf file to them,they need to be universal file which they can also see.Then avi sounds logical but 4 hours non-stop shooting scares me:(
 
Perhaps shooting to a laptop w/external drive using Adobe OnLocation would work for you. I have shot several corporate presentation and training seminars lasting up to 3 hours using this method and it works very nicely.

I typically capture 720p 24pA to a 320 gig Western Digital hard drive through my Dell PC laptop.

An external 500 gig hard drive would hold a great deal of footage and the nice thing about OnLocation is that it strips out the extra pulldown frames so your only storing 24 frames per sec as opposed to 60 (typical 24p video embedded in NTSC stream).

The only thing you need to remember if you record long clips with OnLocation is to hit your PC's F2 button every fifteen minutes or so to instantaniously start recording a new clip. This way you'll have a bunch of 15 minutes clips with nicely synced sound rather than one four hour clip that has the sound going out of sync farther and farther down the line.

I think that four hours of 720p 24pA footage would take up approximately a little less than 100 gigabytes. You can get some decent external drives (I use USB 2.0) for well under $150 to $200. Also you should have a 15 ft firewire cable to connect your camcorder to the laptop firewire port.

Once captured through OnLocation, you could simply import the clips into Premiere Pro CS3, lay them out on the timeline, export to DVD and walk away.

You could then also export the timeline to HD Windows media or h.264 (mpeg4) files so you'll have some nicely compressed, much smaller, HD files to use as source files (taking up much less space than the DVCPro HD source files) allowing you to delete the DVCPro HD files and make more room for the next day's shoot.

The only down side is that all of that rendering would be time consuming. 4 hours a day for 30 days is ALOT of footage.
 
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John thanks for your nice workflow advice,i would definatelly follow it up but the only difference is i will do these things in dvcpro or dvcpro50...

thanks
 
another thing you might wan to plan for is camera/tape/drive malfunction. when im shooting a long event i always use 2 cameras. one of them starts rolling about a minute behind the other. that way ill have cover while the other camera recovers.
 
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