Still fidling.

Weirdly, we can't seem to locate an HDV/Avid savvy facility here in Vancouver - a city with a multi billion dollar film industry & 3 world class labs.

The lab we use is giving us a major break on this one because we've been good clients & the film is on a topic they want to support, so I don't think there's an economic factor here.

The most recent proposal is that we have the lab dub our HDV mini DV camera original tape 'in' shots direct to HD Cam (which the lab can work with as oposed to HDV), reconform, color & title the show and master onto HD Cam.  Does this seem like it will yield a quality result?

Thanks.

chawilk:

can't seem to locate an HDV/Avid savvy facility

You mean they are not HDV savvy? Or also not Avid savvy? Maybe I missed something along the way, but if they are cutting on Avid, I don't understand why you cannot transcode the HDV you have already captured and bring them the transcoded DNxHD media files and project files on a portable hard drive and then have them conform the final timeline and output to HD Cam.

Unless it's just simpler to do it the way you stated. I guess I'm concerned about possible quality loss in the dub process from HDV to HD Cam. It sounds like they are willing to work with you. Do you have the time and cooperation from them to try a short piece both ways and judge the final output?

Neither HDV or Avid savvy.  One small lab has Avid Adreniline but have very little experience with HDV or DNxHD.  We'd be paying full rate there so are a bit hesitant to finance a steep learning curve.

They are entirely capable of dubbing from HDV to HD Cam, so yeah, that's the easy solution.  Great idea to try a small test.  We'll do that.

No one on our team has any DNx experience (we normally shoot film, and the lab takes care of everything else).  Can you recomend where there's a really clear and simple description of the DNxHD workflow.  We've tried chasing this down, all the info we've found assumes a higher level of familiarity than we posess.

Thanks, appreciate it.

Based on all the feedback and on what services are available locally here's the plan:

1.  Duplicate the timeline.

2.  Remove all color correction, titles & fades

3.  Mix down final audio to 2 tracks, delete all other tracks.

4.  Change resolution to 1080i (no HDV)

5.  Transcode to DNxHD

6.  Export transcoded file to a Quicktime animation file on a removable drive

7.  Copy the title sequences in low res to the same drive (for reference)

8.  Take drive to post house, where they'll dub to HD Cam and commence finishing.

Does this sound like a logical way to get the high quality we need?

Thanks

When you say you are removing fades, are they just fades to black or white? To perhaps state the obvious... If you are removing dissolves you will not have any extra head or tail so you would have to export your video as A and B roll, like in  film, so you have overlapping heads and tails for dissolves.

You might want to try a short test exporting as Quicktime animation and also as QuickTime with DNxHD codec, and compare the two. The post house can download the Avid codecs rom Avid's website.

By removing fades, I just meant the fade in at the start & the fade out at the end - something easily re-done on-line.  I have no dissolves so film-like A&B rolling won't be needed.

I'm experiencing real difficulties simply getting the project exported from my machine in best quality.  Trying to export as a Quicktime Animation (lossless) results in what I anticipate to be a 100 gig+ file size, and I'm getting the "exceeds 2 gig size" warning. 

Charles

One reason I suggested DNxHD codec was that it would be a smaller file and theoretically lossless since your media is already DNxHD. However anything you export will be a lot larger than 2GB no matter what codec. Are you using a FAT32 formatted drive? That would have a file size limit, but I think even FAT32 limit is larger than 2gigs. Actually I think it is 32 so that's probably not the problem.

Another possible option would be to consolidate all your media for the project on an external drive and create a QuickTime reference export file instead of an actual QuickTime file. This could be ideal because no media fils would actually be copied, just pointed to by the ref file.  Theoretically it should work fine but that depends I suppose on what it is going into at the other end, and if it will read the QT ref okay.

FAT32's file limit is 4GB. The largest drive partition it could create was 32GB.

The 1 TB drive I'm attempting to export to is NTFS, not Fat 32.  I was under the impression that NTFS had no file size limitation, but I keep getting this error code.   I'm using QT 7.2 as required.

Final word:

Finished the show at the pro lab (awesome guys, probably shouldn't mention their name, but when you think of the few labs everyone in the world has heard of - it's one of those).  Here's what we did.

 

Thank for the report, and for comfirming my thinking anout DNxHD!