XLH1 > FCP2 > Import setting HQ

[Andii]

Hello all.

I have been shooting with the Canon XL H1 for some time but wanted to know a little more
regards capturing the footage. I always shoot 25f (pal) and in HDV.

When it comes to actually bringing in the footage, what are the best settings to keep
the best possible quality? is it Prores? my footage still seems a little noisy (just a little).

Any suggestions? I am not talking gain ect, I just want advice on the capture side.

Also and this may seem like a stupid question, I was talking to somebody at a large production company who said that why didn't I capture using uncompressed 8 bit. My query was, isn't HDV compressed on the tape? does using this codec release the compression?

Any help or advice appreciated.

 

[Demistate]

What you've captured on tape will be the highest quality that the content can be. You won't increase quality magically by encoding it as uncompressed, when it came from an Mpeg-2 source like HDV.

In Quicktime there are advantages and disadvantages to every codec that you can choose.

There is an HDV Codec built into FCP. This shouldn't change your footage around at all. instead it separates the Audio and Video streams, and puts them into a Quicktime Package. Because it's Mpeg-2 the performance may not be as nice, but you havn't changed the footage.

Then there is ProRes 4:2:2. This is higher quality than the HDV, so theoretically there should be no percieved quality loss (do some scientific tests though since ProRes is a wavelet, and lossy codec, and it may be slighty diferent than HDV). You will find the performance on this codec is much better, but it will also take up more disk space.

Do a few workflow tests. Do you have an octo Mac Pro? You could probablly get away with HDV. On the flipside, you may find HDV not good enough once you go heavy into color grading, then ProRes would be a good choice.

There is also AIC, which i'm not too familiar with.

Test. Test. Test!