Editing HDV - In Hinesight

Dont! Just don't.

I'm in the middle of a nightmare - I'm cutting a 190 minute piece and thought "huh! I'll capture to HDV and edit with HDV.... that's smart!" NO IT'S NOT SMART. YOU'RE A FOOL!!!! I should have read my own post about editing HDV using Apple Intermediate Codec in Final Cut Pro.

Rendering HDV is a pain in the arse. You go to render everything - you have to render everything, even a dissolve - and you get a lovely progress bar telling you that Final Cut will be "Conforming" until Christmas!

I now just render for preview (ctrl + r) and that bypasses the need to conform the video. I'll get into this in a bit more detail later.

If you are shooting HDV (now don't get me wrong, HDV footage looks great), for the love of God transcode your footage to DVCProHD, AIC, DV...... anything other than bloody HDV before you start to edit.

I'm currently transcoding the footage to DVCPro50 to make for an easier edit workflow. It looks great when burned to DVD and that's as far as this project is going.

QuickTime Fills The Screen

Hurray for Apple! QuickTime Player has now caught up with every other bloody media player out there!

Early this morning I read an article on TUAW that said that Apple had released updates for QuickTime and iTunes, so off I went to install.

The iTunes update was grand.... run of the mill stuff, but the QT update unlocked a function that was previously only available through QuickTime Pro - Full Screen Playback.

It is kind of silly that Apple are still charging people for QuickTime Pro when almost everything that it does (fullscreen playback, audio transcoding, video transcoding......) can be done through the iLife suite.

I'd say the main reason they unlocked the full screen option now is because of the QuickLook feature in Leopard which will allow you to preview documents, images and video in full screen mode without having to launch any programmes other than the Finder!

Sorry Redmond, the wow starts in October :)