hi there,

i just got a sony z1 and im trying to understand the world of hdv editing. i have captured and edited some hdv footage from it, and it all looks fine, but then what can i do with it?

i try and put it onto a dvd & the program just says it had to shutdown and closes, i make it an avi file and the quality is shocking... so what can u do with it once its edited? how do you export it.

i havent got any other codecs or anything, just adobe premiere pro 2, n thats it... please advise - and in basic language as im not that technically minded!

im thinking of getting an apple G5 powermac with final cut pro... so any advice on the workflow and similar problems i may come across please advise.

many thanks,

Tom

Well, how to make your end result look good depend entirely on where you intend to deliver your final product. At the moment we cannot deliver a high def DVD because we're all (well I am anyway) waiting fro Blu Ray drives to not only appear but come down in price. So what can we do with it?

Well you can export it as a high def wmv.

I always edit high def from my FX1 and sometimes (if I can afford to wait long enough) export a high def wmv copy. I've always found this to be very decent quality for the file size involved. high def AVI's are always the best quality though.

Of course, if you are posting to the web then you will not be exporting as high def - well you might but not if you want me to download it. You'll typically be reducing the size on export.

I typically edit to make DVDs so I edit in high def and export to standrad def MPEG2 for DVD production as the next step in my workflow. I find that editing in high def and down converting on export give a better result than downconverting at capture time and editing.

So then, what is your final delivery to - I maybe able to offer more.

But what I will say is that for a high def workflow in Premiere Pro from that camera you should consider puchasing Cineform Aspect HD. It offers multi layer realtime HD editing in PPro2.

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I'm not young enough to know everything!

Apologies for the thread hijack, but have you tried using an H.264 codec? x264 is a freely available open source H.264 codec which you might want to take a look at. H.264 is the MPEG-4 layer chosen for both HD-DVD and Blu Ray, so you'll also essentially be future proofing your archive ready for HD delivery. Worth thinking about?

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Hi there,

cheers for your advise... i am a little confused about all this plugin and codec thing... in really basic terms could u tell me what they do n why i need it. im new to all these programmin things! im use to just using a program & it works!!! lol

thanks

btw - im trying to put the finished products on dvd!