I client has approached me with a workflow question which I am mulling over. 

They are shooting a show with tape based DVCProHD (Varicam) at 720p 59.94.  They will rent a deck and capture all material to their drives via firewire. 

They then would like to make downrezed copies of the media to firewire drives for offline editing by various editors. After the offline, the locked sequences need to link up to the original DVCProHD 720p 59.94 captures for use in final finish.  They wish to NOT rent the deck again.

The first problem I see is that there is no "lo rez" format available for transcoding of this 59.94 material.  Is this the end of the line for this proposed workflow?

Secondly, and this is a question which I have been wondering about with all of the new file based systems, is decompose a dead tool in the file based world?  It would seem that with the traditional Avid media management strategy where master clips must have matching media clips, that decompose becomes useless and is repaced by consolidate if a reduced version of a project's media is desired during online.

Any thoughts on this in specific or in general?

Cheers,

Jef

Just a thought or two...

1) If you want to save a step, record simutainously to tape and firestore from the camera (we do it all the time).

2) Why low res?  720p 59.94 is quite friendly on its own.  If you must have low res,  I'd downconvert out from the deck/tapes to SD/with TC into the Avid.  Then you could get it all in at a lower res with minimal pain.  Then transfer the files to each station as needed.

Remember to do a sample test (beginning to end) before you commit to a full project.

Tim

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the ideas.

1.  Project has already been shot, so Firestore is out.  We have done that on other projects.

2.  Low Rez because of need to edit on laptops with minimal data rate firewire drive.  At least that is the story right now.  I am advocating GTech drives which will handle DVCProHD.  The laptops may be the problem.

But to beat on this some more, I just do not see how your idea of downcovert to SD would work.  Remember, the goal is to NOT redig, but to use the already captured DVCProHD files.  Which are in a different frame rate than downconverted SD (dv25 presumably) low rez.

The inability of Avid to deal with differing frame rate source material is what I see as the roadblock on this project. Do you see something different?

Cheers,

Jef