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Old 04-19-2008, 03:19 PM  
Jim_Gunn
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Where The Teens Are
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DirtyWhiteBoy View Post
Besides taking up more disk space, what makes it more difficult to edit?

I've never shot or edited HD so I honestly don't know.


This first point, isn't related to editing per se, but this is perhaps the biggest issue with HD production. One often has to light a set with a lot more and more carefully placed lights. I use two or three times or four times the amount of light I would light the same set for an SD production.

Anyway as far as editing itself- for one it does take up quadruple or so of the file space, which starts to get eaten up fast if you film a lot. Then, depending on your workflow, it takes longer to capture, at least in my case, since I use the Cineform Aspect HD software in conjunction with Premiere Pro which immediately converts the HDV footage to a form of AVI with the Cineform codec. (There are a couple of minor advantages to this as opposed to editing the m2t's directly.)

But the worst part is the render time after you edit a video. Even back in SD days, I would always render my movies out to a large intermediate AVI file from the editing app and then bring that file into a professional 3rd party video encoding app like Cleaner XL to batch convert to multiple formats and frame sizes and simultaneously add the watermarks. And this render process takes 2 to 3 times real time even on a Core2Duo pc as opposed to 1/3rd to 1/2 of real time when working with SD footage.

Also the rare glitches in a mini-DV tape also tend to have much more deleterious effects with HDV footage, resulting in longer digital dropouts. And lastly again, depending on your workflow I find that capturing tends to be a little more fragile. In other words, there tends to be more crashes or issues as the computer processors get overtaxed resulting in occasional incomplete captures when I use scene detect. Overall, capturing and editing HDV is a bit more finicky on all my pcs in different ways even though I have the workflow pretty much down.

Still despite all this, and also because most companies I work with want hi-def footage, it is worth the effort because it can be used to create much high resolution and better looking videos with more detail.
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