Question about HDV

Brandon Rice

Brandon Rice

Distributed Producer
Hey everyone,

I'm going to be editing a project shot with a Canon XH-A1, and I was wondering what the process was for bringing the footage into Avid, and what project type I should choose.

Thanks!
 
Ok, I won't have the tapes or camera to use to capture with. Could I use a regular DV camera to capture or do I need the source camera?
 
YOu need an HDV camera or deck to play back HDV. DV decks are DV only.

How can you capture the footage WITHOUT the tapes? I don't understand that. No tapes, no camera. That means you don't have anything.
 
And how did THEY capture it? What edit system did they use? If you say FCP, then you are hosed. Unless you have FCP on the same partition as the Avid...if not, you won't see the footage at all, won't be able to work with it.
 
Yes, but other caveats: the XHA1 doesn't use 1080/60i HDV (unless they shot 60i). If they shot 24fps or 30fps, then it is NOT 1080/60i HDV. The XHA1 uses its own format, called 24F or 30F. For years, no camera or deck other than a Canon HDV camera could even play that format. The very most recent Sony equipment (starting with the V7U) added support for Canon's format.

So if they've digitized it on a hard drive, it's almost unquestionably going to be the 24F format as captured by the Canon camera or deck. I would presume that Avid supports that by now, but I'm pretty sure that it didn't support it in the earlier days.

Hopefully we'll get some XHA1/XLH1 users on here who cut on Avid, to give you a definitive answer.
 
Avid supports the camera and the format NOW. But you need to capture it from the camera. I'm not sure about them delivering already captured footage for use on an Avid.

OH, and Brandon, you don't mention what version of Avid MC you are using.
 
Well, it's not shot or captured yet, so can I ask them to do that, and those files would be readable and editable in Avid?
 
The footage will be coming from me, my DP said we'd be shooting 24F and told me to get the tool HDVSplit which outputs M2T files, and I believe he was saying the output is ProRes

So will that do what we need? The problem being that we are up in Northern California and Brandon is down in So Cal. So I need to capture the footage and ship down to him for editing.
 
So I heard back from the DP. Here's what he had to say:

HDVsplit doesn't record to ProRes, just regular M2T which is the native codec of the A1. It should be compatible with every PC based NLE out there.
Click to expand...

Does that make sense?


I'm going to send the tapes to Brandon along with the footage out of HDVSplit on the drive, that way if there's a problem then maybe he can dig up an A1 somewhere and re-capture (hopefully he won't have to)
 
Larry R said:
Does that make sense?
Click to expand...
makes a lot of sense to me, every editor I use can import m2t files. But I'm not an Avid user.

Brandon or Larry, ask in the XHA1 forum if an XHA1 or XLH1 or XHG1 user can please upload a short 24F clip, and then download it and try it...

I'm going to send the tapes to Brandon along with the footage out of HDVSplit on the drive, that way if there's a problem then maybe he can dig up an A1 somewhere and re-capture (hopefully he won't have to)
Click to expand...
You won't need an A1 to capture; you just need a Canon HDV camcorder. So even an HV20 could be used.
 
My Mac FCP friend had to use clipwrap ($50) in order to bring in M2T (HDV) raw files.

It can rewrap them as .Mov files without transcoding.
 
ok, using a test file, the footage imports into a 720p 23.976 project. But I'm having trouble exporting a QT ref file from a sequence. Thoughts?
 
You can't export QT ref files from long gop media (mpeg).
Some options:
1. Transode the seq or clip to DNxHD and the export a QT ref
2. Do a video mixdown to DNxHD and then export a QT ref
3. Export a self contained QT
 
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