Editing HDV in Final Cut Pro 5

This is what i have discovered while getting my head around editing HDV footage from my lovely, shiney, sexy (is that wrong?!?) new Canon XH-A1...

HDV can be captured straight into Final Cut via firewire, but you have to set the system up for HDV capture before hand in the Audio/Video Settings menu. The Capture interface is similar to the regular capture in final cut, but is geared ONLY towards HDV. It can be logged and batch captured..... or so it says in the help menu, but I have had no success. For some reason Final Cut could never find the timecode, so I just used capture now.


HDV can be edited just the same as DV but because HDV is a long GOP codec, there are only 2 full frames of video in every second and about 23 "in between" frames. This means that if you make an edit, or use a filter or a transition in the footage, Final Cut has to reproduce the affected frames. This is very taxing on the processor and means that simple fades cannot always be played back in realtime.


The upside... and there is an upside... is that HDV is small. 1080i HDV is about the same size as regular old DV.

I haven't been using HDV for either capture or editing. I have been using the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). Again, AIC capture must be set up in the Audio/Video Settings menu. There is an option in the "Capture Preset" called HDV - Apple Intermediate Codec. This allows you to capture HDV through firewire and re-encode it on capture to AIC.

The HDV-AIC capture window is just two fields for filename and description, and a Capture button. You cannot log the footage, meaning that AIC cannot be batch captured through firewire. The AIC QuickTimes in the Capture Scratch folder now become your master tapes! If you have a HDV player with RS-422 Deck Controll and a component video input card you can capture and batch capture to your hearts content. Or if you want to send an EDL or a Final Cut project somewhere else you might have to go down the route of having the tapes logged and captured to an external drive that you can take away with you at at post facility. You are probably better just to make the QuickTimes you new masters though, and keep them backed up somewhere.

If you wanted, you could re-encode the AIC files as compressed DV files as an "offline' option. Edit with the DV files and then at the end just re-link the project back to the AIC files for colour correction and stuff.

Unless you have a super new Mac AIC will not capture in realtime. The tape will play at speed, but Final Cut will have a delay on the footage meaning that it will still be capturing and re-encoding for a few minutes after the tape has stopped - depending on the duration of the footage. The file sizes for AIC are about three times as big as HDV, but they are much easier to work with as you can edit them the same as you would DV or "real" HD.

The sequence should be just set to "Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i50" in the Load Sequence Preset menu.

After that, it's all the same as editing DV......