What YOU say about HDV and ProRes
At the heart of the discussion about ProRes and HDV is the question of "native or not," one of the most contentious discussions we've seen at The COW. There's disagreement even among the very, very sharpest minds among you. So take a look, and see what resonates for you.
As Graeme Nattress puts it::...workflows are just that - very project specific. To take into account all the variables - delivery format, rendering speed, image quality is a very lengthy task.
(You might notice that we agree.)
That said, after the arguments, you've been settling on some conclusions.
Tales of HDV being slow to edit are getting peeled away. Steve Connor:
Do your edit in native HDV. Despite all the hype editing in HDV on a reasonably fast Mac has no problems at all. You get lots of real time including scaling and colour correction, and the long GOP structure doesn't affect the edit process.
The edit process. And if you're performing cuts-only edits, rendering to HDV looks great: all that's being rendered is the new GOPs around the cuts.
But rendering anything else in HDV? Nightmare. Jim Krause: If you want to do *any* compositing, color correcting, keyed graphics or titles, or any level of video enhancment, you'll be really disappointed with HDV. There's very, very little disagreement on that count. In another post, Jim also observes: : [An] eye-opening test: Make a simple graphic in Photoshop. Start your stopwatch and drop it in the timeline over HDV footage. See how long it takes for even a dual G5 to work this out.
But connected to that is an assumption that the HDV renders won't be going back out to HDV tape. That is, the renders themselves won't be in the HDV codec. But if you need to render back to HDV, that's what you need, so go for it. But be prepared for some pain, both now and in the future. While noting that ProRes is optimized for multiple processors, and improves performance dramatically the more horsepower you throw at it, Mike Schell adds a technology note:
Utilizing multiple processors to accelerate a Long-GOP decode is a far more challenging software task compared to an I-Frame CODEC. So, I doubt we'll ever see a big improvement in native HDV render times.
(A related question that nobody seems able to answer: why are there no hardwired HDV chips or boardsets? There certainly are for traditional flavors of MPEG, so what gives?)
Now, despite many observations that native HDV editing works just fine in Final Cut Pro, there's no question that I-Frame codecs offer advantages in performance. In fact, one poster observes that he gets better performance with uncompressed than ProRes on his G5.
Huh? Well, it turns out that uncompressed is also pretty close to "unprocessed." If you have I/O and your drives can handle it, uncompressed is indeed considerably easier on your computer than ProRes.
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