What Do You Do With HD?
How many of you out there shoot HD footage? If you don't now, you probably will be with your next camcorder purchase. It's becoming easier and cheaper to shoot, edit and watch HD footage. But preserving the footage is a lot more difficult than burning and archiving SD footage.
Apple supports HD footage in iMovie and iDVD, but doesn't support Blu-ray burning. To do that, you have to purchase a program like Toast, which is far inferior to iDVD in terms of creating menus and playlists. Of course, you could always go out and buy an Apple TV unit and watch your HD video that way. Apple would like that.
Then there's the problem of preserving raw footage. HD takes up nearly 1 GB of hard disk space per minute. That's five times as much as SD footage. If you buy Toast, you can save that footage onto Blu-ray disks, but only 25 minutes per disk. It gets expensive and time consuming. You can also archive your footage on large capacity external hard drives, but that gets expensive too. So what's a producer to do?
To be safe, I'm archiving to disk and drive. And I'm starting to feel nostalgic for a drawer of tapes.
Comments
Here is my practice for backup of source and final edited files. I use an UNCOMPRESSED format, if possible, to avoid loss of detail
I am looking for others to share best practices.
AUDIO: save in “WAV” file (both PC and MAC)
PHOTO: save in “TIFF” file (PC and MAC)
SD VIDEO: (save in “AVI” -Microsoft DV codec- in PCs) (? for MAC)
HD VIDEO: (? for PCs) (save in DVCPRO HD or DV100 in MAC)
My Sony HDV mini-DV camcorder has a big advantage – it plays and records both SD and HDV formats. The SD and HDV source tapes provide their own backup.
Many (most?) video editors provide a “Tape” output into SD and HDV camcorders. The result is the highest quality backup of the edited source file.
I am frustrated that HD Video has no “AVI” equivalent for swapping intermediate files among competing HD editing software.