Hi all, especially you guys from PAL land.

I have just upgraded my AXP to MC and a project has come to me  - but I think I'm be getting cold feet: All I know is it has been shot on DVCPro HD (1080i 25 or 50?  720p? dunno) There is some HDV footage (Sony 1080i I hope). It has been captured in HD using FCP "sometimes in the field - long clips- sometimes a single 33 minute whole tape clip."

I refuse to edit long form on anything but Avid. I believe I can batch import FCP captured clips using Metacheater. (Anyone done this?)  But then I'm stuck with 54 hours of unlogged HD footage.

Option 1

I have suggested to the producers that I redigitize at SD resolution for offline from scratch because:

1) Subclipping, naming and sorting into bins will take almost as long as redigitising

2) I can eliminate usless footage in the process

3) Rather post-conform only the final cut, because working with 54 hours of HD footage is unwieldy on any system. (They can't understand why I don't want to use FCP - it plays the footage great!)

Option 2

I do the batch import, subclip, sort bins, consolidate and downconvert to SD for the offline, then relink the final cut to the HD media.

Anyone have a gut feeling about this kind of project?

Suggested workflows?

Any major gotchas that I haven't seen?

Many thanks for any thoughts on this.