(Page 2 of 2 pages for this article  <  1 2)

Filed under: Editing •Vendor Blog •

Offline To Online For An HD Project

YOUR VTR

I had briefly mentioned two HD VTR’s before that you might use to do your offline with.  Most people cannot afford to rent an HD VTR, so a great alternative is to have your footage downconverted to D-Beta, Beta SP or even MiniDV to (hopefully) save yourself some money.  One thing that is very, very important if you are looking to rent an HD VTR to do your offline is first, make sure it has all the outputs that you need.  Some VTR’s have HD-SDI only, and that will not help someone who has an SD analog capture card.  Ideally, you want an HD-VTR that has an SD-SDI downconverted output, with the option of playing back 23.976 psF tapes.  Both the Sony F500, and SRW-5500 support this setup, but keep in mind that the SD-SDI downconversion board is an option to those VTR’s, and some companies might not have that available.  Also, you will need to make sure that you change your SD-SDI downconverted output to “Squeeze”, so that it takes your footage and stretches it to fill the entire SD frame size.  That way, when captured into FCP using the “Anamorphic” setting, your footage will be converted back to a proper 16x9 frame.  If you do not know how to change the setting in the VTR, make sure you talk to the rental house before you leave with the machine.  If you are looking to rent one of these VTR’s, I know that in Toronto, Canada, they rent for about $1500 per day, which is expensive.  Another option for editors on a budget is to take your tapes to a post house, and inquire as to how much it would cost to have them capture your footage onto an external FW400/800 drive.  You just need to make sure that you tell them you are doing an offline for a 1080i online, and if they are a reputable post house, they will know exactly what you need.

EDITING

As far as the editing aspect of the project goes, assuming you have set everything up correctly, you should have no problems, and you won’t notice anything different from your normal SD workflow.  Something extremely important to keep in mind is that if you are using stills (i.e. - name keys) from Adobe’s Photoshop, or animated openings, bumpers and lower thirds from Motion 3, make sure that you create and render them in the final output format that you will be onlining.  If you are going to be finishing in 1080i ProRes HQ, make sure that you are working in 1920x1080 square pixels, and you are rendering with the ProRes HQ codec from Motion, so that no additional work is required once your offline is done.  The same goes for Adobe’s Photoshop.  Photoshop actually has television presets including both SD and HD, and I would recommend using PNG files as your file type of choice, as they are real time when working in Uncompressed HD (if that is how you are finishing).

THE OFF TO ONLINE PROCESS

At the end of the day, if you have set your Easy Setup’s correctly, and you choose the correct one before you start, everything should be smooth sailing, and after you get over the overwhelming feeling of completing your first “online”, you will be finishing all your projects in record times keeping your clients happy, and the business returning.  If you have any questions or comments about this article, or anything else Final Cut Studio 2 related, feel free to drop me a line.

(Page 2 of 2 pages for this article  <  1 2)

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?