Pre-Shoot Advice: DV and HDV Cameras

rtbond wrote on 4/28/2007, 9:07 AM

Folk,

I'm a newbie for HDV editing in Vegas. I will be recording a dance recital as a favor to someone in a couple of weeks. The finished product will be a DVD (standard definition). I'll do shooting with two cameras; one DV (actually Digital8) and one HDV (Sony HDR-HC1 camera).

I was not planning to have the camera down convert the HDV footage during capture, so my Vegas (v7) will have an HDV track and a DV track. <actually I plan to use Serious Magic's DV Rack-HD to record HDR-HC1 footage directly to an external HDD, so there would be no tape capture process involved>

Any advice or things to be aware of? (i.e., for a multi-camera shoot mixing DV and HDV footage in Vegas). I will be using the Excalibur scripts to combine the multi-camera footage in Vegas). Might I have challenges synchronizing the audio tracks between the DV and HDV footage due to the differences in encoding?

Would I use the NTSC DV (720x480, 29.970 fps) project template in Vegas?

Thanks!

--Rob

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 4/28/2007, 9:20 AM

I have done almost six dance concerts, doing exactly the same thing as you, with one old DV camera and one HDV camera, delivered in 4:3 SD on a DVD. I created a workflow for this and posted it here:

My workflow for HDV to SD projects

The audio will work just fine, although you probably will want to use the audio from just one camera. If you need to intercut, remember that if they are at significantly different distances from the sound source, you can have sync issues amounting to several frames because of the difference in time that it takes for sound to travel the different distances.

vicmilt wrote on 4/28/2007, 9:21 AM

There's gonna be a lot of opinions on how to proceed.

Here are some thoughts for you, based on exactly the same setuup that I did for a Christmas recital.

1 - Setup your HDV camera to record a "full-stage" lockoff and use the SD camera to get all your close-ups. Then you can put in some really smooth zooms and pans by Zooming and Panning the HDV footage in post. You can do excellent blowups in HDV without loss, because the initial footage has so much resolution.

2 - Do your original edit with the 1440x1080 HDV template. Vegas will fix everything.

3 - Do your final "Render As" as a "two pass Best Render" in DV Widescreen mode MPEG2.

You will be happy - BUT...
shoot a test utilizing this workflow today.

I may have forgotten some critical point - and you should NEVER experiment "on the job".

BTW, in my movie Director/Cameraman I demonstrate some nifty slow-shutter techniques on a ballet recital. Try to get into a rehearsal and try out shooting at 1/8th and even 1/4 of a second. You will be amazed. Not for the whole show, though.

Last - see if they will let you shoot the dress rehearsal as well and get TONS of close-ups

And last - even though I LOVE DV Rack, I still have tape in the camera. Why not? It's only a couple of bucks worth of insurance "Just in case" the laptop hiccups.

Good luck,
v

teaktart wrote on 4/28/2007, 12:17 PM

I recently did the same thing using a HDV and SD two cam shoot.
I was amazed at the difference in colors, clarity, etc between the two even though the SD cam was a 3 chipper.....

I think vicmilts advice on where to locate each camera makes a lot of sense...wish I had thought of that beforehand!

I would be sure to white balance your cameras before you start shooting just to help keep them closer in color should there be a big difference like I had between the two cams.....otherwise, lots of fixing and trying to color match later...

Teaktart

RalphM wrote on 4/28/2007, 8:18 PM

I'd add only one thing to the above advice - focus on the HDV cam (at least on the Sony A1U) does not seem to be as accurate in autofocus mode as it is with the 3 Chip SD cams.

I'll second the advice to use the HDV cam as the wide shot. I used it in 16:9 and shot tight closeups with my VX2000's running in 16:9 and the results were quite satisfactory.

rtbond wrote on 4/29/2007, 5:08 AM

Thanks for the responses.

With DV content I normally render AVI and let DVD-A do the MPEG encoding. I'm guessing in the case of HDV content it is probably not advisable to render as AVI, as this forces the HDV (MPEG2) to be transcoded.

So when rendering as MPEG2 (destined for DVD-A), what template should I be using? I assume the "DVD Architect NTSC Video Stream". What about other custom settings? I have seen posts related to changing the Field Order parameter. Suggestions?

John Meyer - Can you help me understand what your crop script is accomplishing vs letting the intrinsic cropping occur when your render from Vegas using the NTSC DVD-A template

Thanks!

johnmeyer wrote on 4/29/2007, 7:46 AM

John Meyer - Can you help me understand what your crop script is accomplishing vs letting the intrinsic cropping occur when your render from Vegas using the NTSC DVD-A template

If you follow my workflow (which uses HDV project properties) and you DON'T crop the HDV, you'll end up with letterboxed HDV on your 4:3 SD project. In many cases, this is exactly what you want, but in my case, I was intermixing 4:3 SD with 16:9 HDV. The goal was to pan/scan the HDV and convert to 4:3. So, the purpose of the script is to look at every 16:9 HDV event and, for those that weren't already pan/scanned manually, to convert those to 4:3 with the focus (the 4:3 box) exactly centered on the 16:9 video.

rtbond wrote on 4/29/2007, 9:43 AM

John,

OK, so if I am following, when I have a project with both HDV and DV content (which is the case in my planned two camera shot) and I do not apply your cropping script to the HDV content then the rendered 4:3 SD project would have a mixture of lettterboxed scenes (from the HDV footage) and full screen 4:3 content (from the DV footage) , which would of course look strange. Is that correct?

What if I rendered the final project using the 4:3 widescreen template, would all the scenes then be letterboxed? I understand your workflow produces full screen (non-letterboxed) 4:3 SD. I'll play around with this a bit myself.

Thanks for your time.

--Rob

johnmeyer wrote on 4/29/2007, 1:35 PM

No, I am afraid you are not following. EVERYTHING on the final DVD will be 4:3. Nothing will be letterboxed. The HDV is cropped at each side so that what remains is 4:3. That is what the script does. In addition, if you re-read my original post on the subject (in that other thread), the whole purpose of my workflow was to take advantage of the fact that a 16:9 HDV video, if it is eventually going to be cropped to 4:3 and distributed as SD, lets you do a VERY USEFUL trick, namely you can pan back and forth on the original frame and, using keyframing in Vegas, move that crop box. This lets you re-frame shots where you blew it during shooting (and many of my shoots are run-n-gun affairs, so I blow it a lot). In addition, you can zoom in quite a ways in the HDV stream, and still have more bits that you need for the final SD render. Thus you can create zooms in the final product that you didn't actually do during the shoot.

So, to re-interate, My workflow for HDV to SD projects describes a way to mix HDV and SD NTSC 4:3 DV on two timelines in the same project; how to pan/scan the HDV; how to preview the HDV in 4:3 while still seeing the entire 16:9 frame (by using a semi-transparent mask); and how to apply a crop to the HDV events that have not yet been pan/scanned so that all the HDV will be rendered to 4:3 without letterboxing bars at the top and bottom.