Inspired by the Final Cut Pro workshop at the ACM-NE conference, I am going to try to build a blog here entitled Tip of the Week (or day, or month, whatever I can find time to do. If anyone has any questions about anything they want to know, or a particular problem they are having, feel free to post it here. If I see anything on the forum I will try to incorporate it here as well.

I know not everyone can afford the Lynda.com membership, so if you see something on the list there that you might want to learn, let me know and I will post a video tutorial on our site.

So, here it goes:

May 13, 2008 Final Cut Studio tip of the day.

I overheard a conversation at the conference between two people talking about shooting with HDV cameras and outputting to MPEG-2 for their server playout, The problem they were having was when they tried to compress the finished movie to MPEG-2 they were getting a General Error message.

There are a few issues here to deal with. First, shooting in HDV requires a bit of a complicated workflow. HDV is already compressed to MPEG-2. It is a delivery format, not an editing format. If anyone here has already tried editing HDV, you will be familiar with the long conform times. This is because FCP has to reorder the IBBP GOP every time you make an edit (unless you are skilled enough to make all of your edits at "I" frames, which is a monumental waste of time to figure out...) So you will get the General Error message when you try to recompress it. So, before you edit your HDV material make sure you convert it first to an "I" frame only codec, like DVCPro HD. You could use APple ProRes, or Apple Intermediate Codec, but these do not support RT effects and you will still need to go through some lengthy renders. With DVCPro HD you will not.

Next, since we are all still broadcasting SD, you need to convert your DVCPro HD sequence to SD 4:3 letterboxed. Many people go directly from the timeline to compressor or QT conversion for this change. To force either app to make the entire change at once (meaning an SD and an MPEG-2 conversion) means that no part of the process is ideal. Do this in stages.

HDV workflow in a nutshell:
1. Capture as or convert HDV to DVCPro HD.
2. Edit and add effects at this level.
3. Export the finished sequence to DVCPro HD self contained movie. (Using COmpressor for this is better, but takes a bit longer.)
4. Convert that to SD using the Animation codec or Apple lossless. (Big files here!)
5. Convert the SD Animation codec video to MPEG-2 at no more than 6Mb/s.

This will give you an astonishing result. It takes a long time, but if quality is your care, which if you are shooting HD it is, or at least should be, then this will far surpass doing a direct compression from the original footage.