HDV capture & editing

[Billy Griffin]

For those that have converted to high definition video (HDV), just curious to know what software applications you're using to not only "capture" your footage, but for post-production as well?

I'm using Sony Vegas Premier (program cost about $500) and it works great - video quality is exceptional! However, the challenge is FILE SIZE. Capturing and keeping it as HD creates .m2t files that are eating up my hard drive space. Some HD captures of 5 minutes of video are running close to 3-5 GB in file size! Sure, once I edit, I can produce the movie in .wmv, .mov, or other "compressed" versions, but I'm not all that fond of loss in quality.

What I'm doing now is saving the edited feature as an .AVI file that is UNCOMPRESSED and in HD 1920 X 1080. Again, the video comes out just awesome, but file size is a challenge. And you can almost forget doing any kind of video clips download I guess... uploaded the .m2t files for my media server version on my webpage - again, some files near 1 GB in size.
VLC makes a player to view these on and you can download it for free - that's what I've been doing all this time. But unless you have one heck of a high-speed connection, a 1 GB download could take an hour or more!

Any ideas from the video pros? Capturing and having large .m2t files, I can live with. But what is the best file format to save my projects under that offers the best quality for the lowest file size - can it even be done?

FWIW, if you want to see some uncompressed HD video, and have a compatible .m2t player, just go to http://www.billygriffin.com/media.htm

Thanks in advance !!!

 

[Joey Ketcham]

Very nice, Billy.

Just watched one of the clips, the quality is amazing. I'm looking to get a HD Cam before next year, I'm hoping. What camera do you have? I saw it that time we met in Texas but forgot, it's a sony isn't it?

 

[Billy Griffin]

For field use, the Canon XH-A1. For studio use, the Canon XL-H1. Both are pretty much the same camera in terms of what they'll do, except the H1 gives me HDMI and TC/Genlock capabilities, as well as an uncompressed HD signal directly out of the camera. I've used both the A1 and the H1 on a few chases this year, and it has yielded some great video in HD! Now the hard part - editing it all together into an HD presentation that will not require a 500GB hard drive for 30 minutes of video!

Here's a link to the two cameras I'm using...
http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ProductCatIndexAct&fcategoryid=172

If I'm not mistaken, I think there's actually quite a few on here that are doing HD already... but my posts tend to receive little response anyway. Nevertheless, I'm just curious to know what those who are capturing in HD are saving their finished clips as (format, bitrate, etc.)

 

[Jody Radzik]

I'm using a Canon HV-20 and Final Cut Express to edit on my Intel iMac dual 2.16 GB with 2 GB of RAM and a 500 GB scratch disk. Here is my first result:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9090860336123150408&hl=en