HDV question

Hi

I'm doing some research into HDV as a format. I'm looking for the following information from people who've used the format.

1) Anyone here used Lumiere HD in conjuction with FCP 4 to edit native HDV? (Or did you find something better)
2) When you were editingt did you find any problems with the edit (slow or excessive rendering needs/poor transitions or any other issues) If the answer to this is yes, did you solve the problem by converting to another codec.
3) Did you find that HDV needed special consideration when lighting? Did it prefer to be slightly overlit like DVCProHD?
4) How did it respond to low light situations? Did strong black lines in the image pixelate in post?
5) Where there any particular problems with getting good audio?

Any other feedback you have about it as format, good or bad would be appreciated.
 
I've only shot HDV (with the Sony z1), not posted, but to answer some of your questions.

I did not find I had to do anything special with the lighting. I lit my sets as I normally would. Most of my setups were fully lit, so I didn't really get a chance to try any low light scenarios (but everything I've read about the camera has talked about the same low light issues that you have with most small dv cameras).

I thought the audio quality was good. I even used the camera to record narration bits.
 
That's interesting. DVCProHD responds to being slightly underlit rather than slightly over. Interesting that that's not true for HDV.

What did you edit on?
 
Using HD has many major pluses over other digital formats such as frame rate and retaining the picture quality of other formats such as 35mm, but i find that light is much harder to manipulate in the way which you desire to improve shot standards, but the major problem is definately sound, especially when only using the camera's sound set up. A secondary sound source is almost essential, especially if you are shooting from any relative distance from the source.
 
Was that specific to HDV, I've shot full HD before or rather Panasonic DVCProHD 720i at 24fps.

I know that HD handles slightly differently than digibeta, but I've no experience with HDV and there are persistant rumours about problems.
 
I have FCP 5 on a Mac Pbook G4. It has 2GB ram and 400GB FW800 drive that I use for video footage. I found that HDV editing on this was very very sluggish. I suspect you need a G5 class machine to really do it justice. I ended up editing in SD and then moving the HDV transcoded intermediate format files over the SD files and did a final render out of that and it seemed to work OK.

Premiere Pro 1.5.1 on a 3.6GHZ machine with 4GB RAM did native editing of HDV just fine. Was smooth as silk.
 
I was talking with a guy a Production Junction in NY today about shooting HDV, when the end product is DVD. He said there's really no point as you'll be downconverting to SD NTSC eventually anyway, thereby losing the HD resolution. Thoughts on this? Is HDV really only good for HD broadcast, or HD-DVD (once it's in use), or a film blowup? Or is there some benefit despite downconversion?
 
To play back HDV on my HDTV, I have to transfer it to D-VHS or play it right out of the camera via component. Since I wanted to be able to have HD content for the InTarWEB, HDV made good sense for me.
 
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