In working with the documentary genre, you find yourself using all sorts of different format clips: HDV, SD, widescreen, 4:3, stuff off the web, stuff off of DVDs, animations, etc. On top of that, you find yourself wanting to render to a variety of formats: SD widescreen, NTSC, PAL, SD widescreen, SD 4:3, HDV and .264 for web delivery. The trick is how to do all this in a way that allows good previewing while editing and end up with as good a final product as possible.
Gearshift has come to my rescue. I find I can work in 16:9 SD format using Gearshift to render avi proxies from the .m2t HDV files. Everyone does that, but I find I can also render 16:9 proxies from 4:3 footage (with pillarbars), and proxies from VOB files that are renamed with .m2t extensions. This is important because when I request footage from people, it often comes on DVDs.
Anyway, I'm working on a project right now with a mix of HDV, SD 16:9, SD4:3 and SD4:3 mpeg. I have 16:9 proxies from everything that isn SD16:9 to begin with. I'm previewing everything full resolution and I can render to any format I want with no extra generations during the final render. This is just too cool!
I do have one issue though (I've brought up a similar one before though). That is I find myself rendering a lot of proxies outside of Gearshift. This is because for some reason, when I render proxies from non-hdv sources, the SD widescreen proxies are slightly different than a standard SD widescreen avi. They don't smart-render and they don't properly preview with a 1394 external monitor setup. I have no idea why. If you play them from media player or examine their properties they seem fine.
Anyhow, I just set up a batch render another way and rename the files manually when I'm done and Gearshift switches back and forth perfectly from then on. It would be really cool however if Gearshift could do the render non-hdv proxies properly as well.
Gearshift has come to my rescue. I find I can work in 16:9 SD format using Gearshift to render avi proxies from the .m2t HDV files. Everyone does that, but I find I can also render 16:9 proxies from 4:3 footage (with pillarbars), and proxies from VOB files that are renamed with .m2t extensions. This is important because when I request footage from people, it often comes on DVDs.
Anyway, I'm working on a project right now with a mix of HDV, SD 16:9, SD4:3 and SD4:3 mpeg. I have 16:9 proxies from everything that isn SD16:9 to begin with. I'm previewing everything full resolution and I can render to any format I want with no extra generations during the final render. This is just too cool!
I do have one issue though (I've brought up a similar one before though). That is I find myself rendering a lot of proxies outside of Gearshift. This is because for some reason, when I render proxies from non-hdv sources, the SD widescreen proxies are slightly different than a standard SD widescreen avi. They don't smart-render and they don't properly preview with a 1394 external monitor setup. I have no idea why. If you play them from media player or examine their properties they seem fine.
Anyhow, I just set up a batch render another way and rename the files manually when I'm done and Gearshift switches back and forth perfectly from then on. It would be really cool however if Gearshift could do the render non-hdv proxies properly as well.