Dan's Guide to Sony HDV Workflow

I've been working in HDV 1080 60i full time for the past year and a half, spending much of that time pulling my hair out over problems encountered with the codec. I put together a little guide to help out anybody who is embarking on a journey to cut a video using HDV footage assembled from the myriad of lessons I've learned. Enjoy!

Sony HDV workflow for FCP

I am going to write this in a painfully obvious manner as I tend to forget steps like turning on the camera myself.

This is the workflow for capturing Sony HDV 1080 60i and converting it to ProRes to edit. You can edit HDV natively, however, it is a terrible format to edit in and will cause problems if you want to key, color correct, or add visual effects to your project.

CAPTURING HDV

This is assuming that you are shooting HDV 1080 60i on a Sony camera. If you don’t know what the frame rate of your camera is, it is most likely 60i, you have to manually change settings on the more expensive cameras to get false 24p and the such.

Make sure you have Final Cut Pro 6, otherwise you’re not going to have access to Sony HDV settings or ProRes. Open Final Cut Pro and set your scratch disks. Make sure you have at least 30 gigabytes of space on whatever hard drive you choose.

Also set video settings, don’t worry about easy setup. Make your sequence ProRes 422 1440x1080 60i. NOT ProRes HQ. NOT 1900 x 1080. NOT 1220 x 1080. Import settings should be HDV – ProRes 422. Once again, not HQ. HQ is the same quality of ProRes except with massive files that are impossible to store. You’re already going to be hurting for space using just standard quality. Finally, set your camera settings to Sony HDV. It used to be HDV Firewire Basic, but FCP 6 has the Sony setting.

Rewind your tape to the very beginning. ProRes import is different than DV and won’t rewind the tape for you. Plug the camera in to the computer using good ol’ firewire 400. Put your camera into VCR mode. If you’re using a deck, make sure that the deck is in HDV mode. I’ve spend hours yelling at a VCR for not working when it was just sitting in DV mode the whole time.

Select Log and Capture. A tiny window will come up asking you to name the tape. ProRes importing will work through the tape and automatically divide up the footage into clips and automatically prefix them with the tape description. It is wonderfully easy and far superior DV capture. Let the computer capture. As it captures you’ll be able to monitor the footage. Don’t worry if the motion is behind, the computer will be screaming.

NOTE: If you’re on a Mac laptop, be very careful about importing. After one tape the computer will overheat and you’ll get a grey screen of death.

After it finishes importing a large amount of clips will suddenly appear. Now your footage is ready to edit. Make sure you keep your timeline set to ProRes 422 1440x1080 60i throughout the process. When you first drop in a clip a warning might appear that asks whether or not you want to change sequence settings to match clip settings. Always click yes on this.

EXPORTING PROJECTS ORIGINATED IN HDV

Exporting high definition is a pain in the ass. I’ve been struggling with it for years and there are no clear answers, just compromises. However, here are some of the tricks I’ve picked up over hours of swearing at the machines.

The primary reason that exporting footage that originated as HDV 1080 60i is a hair pulling process is the fact that it’s interlaced. I don’t know why the gods decided to make interlaced HD, but they cursed us with it and we have to deal. When you edit on your computer, you’re going to look at motion that looks 30p, and all will be well. However, when you go to export it, suddenly it looks like your parent’s home videos with 60i motion. Huh? I’ve tried a billion techniques to try to make my footage 30p and I’ve only come up with a handful of processes that work.

DVDs

Since Mac has a tradition of making everybody’s lives miserable by ignoring formats that they helped create (like the recent abandonment of Firewire 400), Mac has shrugged off Blu-Ray as well. Thus, you’re stuck with DVD if you want to give out your HD film in a consumer friendly format. But wait, isn’t DVD standard definition and interlaced? Yes. Welcome to hell.

Forget about trying to make things progressive in DVD Studio or Compressor, it’s not going to work and you’re going to get those awful interlace artifacts. Once you finish editing your project, go to your sequence settings. You’re going to see a box that says ‘upper’ in reference to scan lines. Select none. Then go to advanced settings and uncheck the interlaced box. Now your timeline is 30p without any artifacts. Take this timeline and send it to compressor. Compress it like any ordinary SD project, and you got a 60i DVD with progressive motion and no artifacts.

WEB OR COMPUTER VIDEO

Sweet! So by just changing the sequence to 30p all of your problems are solved in regards to Progressive looking motion? Sadly, no. For some strange reason, if you export using the sequence settings above to quicktime, you’re going to end up with some wonky artifacts. So return your sequence to its original settings of interlaced motion if you changed them or just keep them as they are. For some reason, the weirdly progressive interlaced motion that you’ve been editing in will be preserved, so you’ll get 30p from 60i. It’s a mysterious world.

If you’re wanting to make a master copy of the film, simply export as a quicktime movie, make sure it’s self contained, and use the exact same settings that you’ve been editing in. Don’t expect to use this file for anything other than archiving or further compression, it won’t play on PC and takes at least a quad core Mac Pro to play properly.

YouTube is now HD, so there’s no reason to export in anything other than sweet HD when posting to the web. Select export with Quicktime conversion (not movie). You’ll need to change the settings from default. Select H.264 as your codec and set it to 10000 to 6400 kbps depending on how big you want the file. If you just want to make a sweet looking file and aren’t concerned about size, ignore the bps box and push the quality slider to highest quality. Now move down to size. Select HD 720, not 1080. Ignore the weird default that will be listed when you open the window. If you’re adventurous, I’ve heard that adding a filter that crushes the blacks makes videos look many times superior. Let me know what you find out.

A quick note, for any sort of HD export in any codec for delivery, I recommend exporting in 720 not 1080. First off, nearly every monitor that people actually watch is 720 max, so 1080 doesn’t get you anywhere. Second, 720 gives you square pixels rather than the strange anamorphic ones with normal 1080 footage (Remember, HDV actually records a square picture and stretches it out later). Last and most important, there have been tests that show that the human eye usually can’t tell the difference between 720 and 1080, so why waste date on redundant information? If you’re trapped at 10 mbps, why not use that data rate to make a kick ass 720 picture than a mediocre 1080 picture at the same rate? 1080 exists to sell expensive televisions and equipment.

If you need to export something in a hurry and aren’t concerned about quality, use the MPEG-4 codec. It’s just a worse and fast version of H.264. Put quality at best and give it 6000 kbps. (MPEG-4 settings are a tad different than H.264) Put frame size down to anamorphic 16:9 NTSC. It’ll export extremely fast, but if you have any sort of movement, expect the picture to pixelate severely. On the plus side, this file will play on even the slowest of computers.

I hope you find this mini guide helpful. Let me know if you have any questions, problems, or better ideas!