HDV Output for Film Festival

JG123 wrote on 3/13/2009, 3:34 PM

I edited my movie (shot on Sony HCR7 HDV Cam) on Sony Vegas 8.0 and I need to master to DVCAM. But when I choose Print to Tape, it wants to render the file to compressed m2t. But I don't want compressed.

To get around this, I've rendered the 77 minute film to .avi using the 'uncompressed' codec, but someone told me its still compressed even though it's 650 GB.

Does anyone know how I can output this in the highest quality uncompressed format and still have it fit on a 1TB drive?

Thanks!!

jg123

Comments

Tim L wrote on 3/13/2009, 5:11 PM

Right off I want to point out that I am not an expert but...

...DVCAM is exactly the same format/codec as regular (standard definition) DV (i.e. miniDV) except that the tape runs at a slower speed, thereby producing a physically wider recording track on the tape, resulting in a greatly reduced chance of dropouts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVCAM#DVCAM

If you can submit on a hard drive, I expect you can just render a standard DV .avi file (widescreen?). The output format will be 720x480 pixels (if NTSC) and of course will be a compressed format, but that is what they are asking for. A 77 minute DV video should be about 17 GB.

If you need to actually submit on a tape, you would need a camcorder or a vcr deck that supports DVCAM mode. (Oh, and 77 minutes won't fit on a DVCAM miniDV tape -- 40 minutes max. Not sure about full size DV tape...)

If they are actually expecting a hi-def format, then the request for DVCAM seems to be wrong.

If nobody else comes along here and gives you a more authoritative answer, try posting in the Vegas Pro forum -- there are lots of pros over there that can help. (Just preface your post saying you didn't get any results over here...)

JG123 wrote on 3/13/2009, 10:55 PM

Thanks Tim! Much appreciated!