Massive HDV Capture project seeks definitive answer.... X or 7

Hi Every One! This is my first post in this forum!
Thank you for building such a vibrant community!


I am about to embark upon a 4 week capture project. 18 tapes per day! It is a LOT of HDV tape.
Well heres my dilemma, i currently own 7, and do not own X. I do not mind upgrading, BUT....
I want to capture using the best possible settings, and I would prefer to do this as automatic as possible.

Can any one think of a reason to NOT use X for this? i would assume that my Capture files from 7 would sitll work in X, but would X captured videos (not projects) work in 7?

Does any one know if scene split works with HDV in 8 (it does not work in fcp7)

The bottom line for me is quality..... i want the highest quality possible.

Could someone please provide insight here?

Thank you very much.

I have to ingest 5 HDV tapes tomorrow. I"ll let you know how it goes in FCP X.

My guess it will actually be better than FCP 7 because of the shot detection and the somewhat automatic operation. However, if there are timecode breaks I'll have to see how FCP X handles that. The Camera archive might also come in handy.

As far a quality, I can tell you now it will be identical between the two apps. They are both using the same codec to capture.

FCP 7 does scene detection for HDV, it's standard. The quality is what is on the tape. The tapes are digital data, what comes off will be the same digital data. What you need to think about is speed. Ingesting as ProRes 422 will make things go faster through the rest of the edit/output process.

A reason to not use FCP X? It's version 1.0 and has bugs. But I know people using it just fine with no real problems.

Wow, fast qualified responses... I fop.co.... Thanks!

From my experience, Scene detection must be camera specific. Fcp7 does not automatically create individual clips from independant scenes (like hdvsplit does) on footage that is shot / captured on a canon xha1.

in an unrelated question, can iMovie handle prorez422? Editing hdv with 422 has been a dream, since converting from premiere 5.5. Sometimes I want to hand over my footage to clients with iMovie...can they buy the 422 codec?

Thanks

The auto splitting seems to be based on the internal camera clock and not the timecode of the footage so will only work if you have a working internal battery in your camera and if the time has been set.
Its the same issue for miniDV footage too - theres a "DV Start/Stop detect" option in the edit menu I think and that only adds markers if your camera has a working battery and the time/date has been set.
Hope this helps if you have problems with the auto-detect - not sure if imovie uses the same feature or not though.

For tape based workflow, only for HDV does Log & Capture split into scenes based on SMPTE timecode (hrs:min:sec:frm).

DV Start/Stop Detect is mainly for SD DV, and works on TOD (Time of Day) Timecode (calendar/watch time, and yes, camera's clock must be set at least once for this to activate on some cameras).

As for quality, you can capture from HDV tape as ProRes 422 in FCP.

For playback, I prefer the more universal and excellent quality H.264, but check this out for ProRes playback:

support.apple.com/downloads/Apple_ProRes...oder_1_0_for_Windows

Thrive -

I just finished my 5 HDV tapes, and I must say that ingest was a piece of cake and more automatic than FCP 7. I used a function called camera archive in FCP X, which creates a package with everything on the tape. What makes it great is you can just pop in a tape, hit "create archive" and it will rewind the tape, capture and then let you know when it is done and ready for the next tape. No intervention needed. I'm guessing it took about 5 minutes to setup in the morning and then about 30 seconds of intervention for me to switch out tapes.

I did this yesterday while finishing up some other work on the same machine and it worked flawlessly for 5 tapes.

I can confirm these files import into FCP 7 without a problem. Just right click on the archive and choose "open package" and then you can further organize the clips there. They even have a TOD time stamp on the clip name which is nice. But they do not retain the Reel name when importing.

From your project, I believe that FCP X would be faster because of the somewhat automated process. If you happen to have an extra camera and another Mac you can have FCP X running on multiple machines without a problem and get your work done that much faster.

However, with that said, since the final edit will be in FCP 7 (I assume). You are not gaining anything as far as quality but only the speed of the process with FCP X (which is very compelling), but you could potential run into trouble since it is 1.0 software (I actually doubt it would give you any trouble)..

If I had a large project like this I would setup this capture on my MacBook Pro in FCP X while I continue to do other work, that way if I have to restart my main edit machine it won't be a problem. You'll get all your tapes ingested and nicely organized, and you will have invested very little actual time (although you'll be capturing for weeks).

One more thing. I think I'm actually recommending FCP X strongly now. I had a HDV tape with about 6 or 7 timecode breaks. I couldn't even capture this in FCP X normally. However, I tried again by creating the camera archive first, and it grabbed everything on the tape and didn't seem to mind the time code breaks.

Score one more point for FCP X.

Is there any way to have FCPX split up a tape capture that's brought in as a file? I have some old DV captures that were created as continuous Quicktimes that I'd like to split based on stop/start timecode.

FCP 7 has a "DV Start/Stop Detect" function that did that. It read the Time-Of-Day timecode to achieve it. But FCP X has no such function at this time.

BenB wrote: FCP 7 has a "DV Start/Stop Detect" function that did that. It read the Time-Of-Day timecode to achieve it. But FCP X has no such function at this time.

Not quite true. If you can go back to the original tapes and make a 'Camera Archive' using FCPX - it will capture and auto magically split up all the footage into clips according to when it was Start/Stopped. It will even attribute the date and time in the files themselves to whenever they were actually recorded as though it was shot on a tapeless camera.

The same with just importing them into a event.

Scrubelicious wrote: The same with just importing them into a event.

The same as what? Sorry I don't quite follow... Is there a way to break up the file on import?

Only for HDV tape, not SD tape, which is how v.7 worked. DV Start/Stop Detect was made for SD tape, HDV has the function built in to the codec and never needed this function.

hmm I can only say for myself that I have captured SD footage over FireWire into FCPX and it did separated the clips.

oscarmeier wrote:
The same as what? Sorry I don't quite follow... Is there a way to break up the file on import?

And this is what I meant it will split the clips during capture or archiving.

Just in case it was a Canon XL1s and another small camcorder.

Really? It did? I only tried capturing from SD tape once, the first day we had FCP X, as we had a student's SD tape cam in the studio that day. Our studio hasn't seen a tape camera, much less an SD camera in so long, I forget what they look like. But we didn't have that experience with just one quick run. That's really great to hear! So, it does the Start/Stop Detect on the fly automatically? That's really awesome to hear! Way to go Apple! I stand corrected, and very gladly!

Yeah I was thinking of the same since I could not find any info for a DV Start/Stop Detect function. Even before testing FCPX in any way we used FCP7 and Compressor to split the clips.
But after telling myself for a buddies project what the hell I went for it and boom FCPX did it!
That made my day!

Yeah, it's there in FCP 7. Highlight an SD capture clip in the Browser, I think it's in the Modify, or Markers menu. It was pretty cool when I used v.7 and SD tape, so long ago I can't remember when it was... But yes, it's been there in legacy FCP for a long time.

Just wanted to say I confirmed the DV start stop capture for my camera. I grabbed a Sony CDR-TRV11 and a DV tape from 2005.

It worked like a charm. Both as creating an archive and importing into an event straight from the camera. As you can see from the screen captures, the clips are stamped with date and time. For not supporting Tape formats FCP X does pretty well here.

THAT is so nice! Thanks for the screen shots!