Because it records in an MPEG 4 format though, it doesn’t provide the easiest files for editing. The software provided with the camera is OK for most things (and it’s great to be able to upload directly to YouTube et al), but when it comes to editing which involves anything more complex than just stringing a bunch of clips together, I need to fall back on something more powerful.

Final Cut Pro is my primary weapon of choice when it comes to video, but it doesn’t natively handle MPEG 4 files very well – and nor should it: MPEG 4 is a hefty codec intended for distribution.

So I’ve had to come up with a little workflow to convert that lovely Flip footage into something which will play nicely with Final Cut Pro. MPEG Streamclip to the rescue!

I love MPEG Streamclip – it’s my swiss army knife for doing any kind of video file wrangling. It’ll handle pretty much any file conversion job you can throw at it, and always comes to the rescue when I need to format A isn’t playing nicely with format B.

So, to get that Flip footage working with FCP, it’s just a case of firing up MPEG Streamclip and opening the a source Flip file (once you’be got them saved to a folder on your hard drive). Then just follow these simple steps:

1. Go to the “File” menu and choose “Export to Quicktime…”
2. In the “Compression” drop-down choose “Apple DVCPRO HD 720p60″
3. Select “Make Movie”, choose a location for your output file, and that’s it.

It couldn’t be simpler!

Why the DVCPRO HD 720p60 codec? Well, the native Flip video format is 720p HD, with a frame rate of 30fps – this is the best fit for conversion. DVCPRO will give you excellent quality video without losing too much in the conversion.

Now, to edit this footage in Final Cut, all you need to do is create a sequence using the “DVCPRO HD 720p30 preset, and you’re away.

It’s basically a camera stabilisation filter which has been ported from Shake. It processes your footage to create a vector map of all of the objects and movements, then using that data to manipulate the original footage to create smooth camera motion.

The processing of your footage can take some time, but it’s a one-off task, and once it’s done, you can make changes to the filter settings without the need to re-process. You can make adjustments to the amount of each transformation the filter applies. One of the other things it does is to automatically zoom the image to mask any black areas which appear, due to the compensation of the transformations – and you can also set the level at which this is applied.

I’ve been working with some footage which was shot in a hurry, with a Z7 mounted on a tripod strapped around my neck and braced with both arms. A lot of it was fast-paced and there were a few bumps, which is why I wanted to run SmoothCam through its paces, to see whether I could get an authentic syeadycam look with my shoddy, rushed footage. I shot in HDV, but the end result is going onto a SD DVD, so I had plenty of flexibility in how much I could zoom the image, which in turn, allowed me to ratchet up the SmoothCam settings quite high.

And it looks fantastic! It’s not perfect, but it goes a long way to tidying up the material. And with filmic grading, and 1.35 letterboxing, it looks quite authentic.

It’s certainly not a cure-all, and is best suited to tracking shots, or slow pans. It can have trouble with irregular movement, or fast pans, at which point you have to chop your footage and carefully splice filtered and unfiltered clips together – it can be time-consuming, but then you can’t have everything for free.

I just wish I could show off the final footage, but sadly it’s a private commission which can’t be broadcast publicly.

Stick “SmoothCam” into Google though, and you’ll get a heap of articles on the subject – some with examples of test footage.

What’s so super-duper about them? Well, there are ways to create a filmic look using some simple de-interlacing and messing around with saturation and contrast filters, but it can be difficult getting the right look. I’m also not convinced that Final Cut does a very good job of de-interlacing. There are some kludges you can use to split the field order of interlaced footage, adding a bit of blur for good measure, but it’s a black art and mileage may vary depending on how keen your eye is, and the type of footage you’re working with.

Film Effects just takes the pain out of it and gives you a wide range of presets which you can tweak to your hearts content. Admittedly, there is a $100 price tag (around £50 in real money), so I guess you need to weigh up whether you’re willing to pay up for it.

Now, the basic effects were designed for DV footage, primarily to give DV the look of 24p, along with some bleaching and contrast adjustments (there are a whole host of settings and parameters you can tweak, but essentially that’s the main focus of what they do). So I’ve never really considered their use for HDV footage. Until now that is.

I’m putting the finishing touches to a documentary right now which will really benefit from a filmic look. Ordinarily, I’d just put the master footage through a de-interlace filter when downconverting for DVD in Compressor – since the footage is being scaled down, the effect of the de-interlace (the removal of one set of the fields) isn’t really noticeable, so it’s a quick fix. But it’s a bit of a cheat, and I’m not sure it’s creating the best results.

Turns out the Nattress filters will work just as well for HDV as they will for DV. The only consideration is that you have to keep an eye on the field order (HDV uses the upper field first, whereas DV uses the lower field first), but essentially it’s just doing the same thing: resampling two fields into one, albeit on a larger scale.

Rendering takes a little longer than usual, but the resulting footage is looking very lush.

So, it was time to say goodbye to the G5 (it’s now relocated to the other side of the office and has had a fresh reinstall ready to jump into action as a second editing workstation), and hello to a shiny new MacBook Pro. We decided to plump for a refurbished notebook, which saves a little money (every little helps). This is the second time I’ve splashed out on a refurbished machine and it’s something I’d recommend to anyone looking to purchase a new Mac. Apple’s refurbished products are usually either returns (people get them, open the box, decide they don’t want/need them) or dead-on-arrival (something was broken coming out of the factory. Might sound scary buying something which might have once been broken, but they get a full refurb, are thoroughly tested, and you get a full warranty, just like if you were buying a freshly-boxed machine.

With a 1TB firewire drive hooked up, this new Intel machine rips along at an impressive speed. And since we’ve been angling towards recording to Compact Flash cards, it was also time to upgrade to Final Cut Pro 6, so that we can benefit from importing clips using a card reader, rather than capturing from tape. The benefits of this are going to be brilliant – transferring files from the card reader will take about a quarter of the time it takes to capture in real-time from tape, making for a much more pleasant editing life.

I’ve yet to use this workflow to any great extent (other than a few tests), but now that it’s tried-and-tested, we’re going to start using this approach as standard – just as soon as I source the cheapest and most reliable Compact Flash cards.

With the upgrade to Final Cut Studio 2, I’ve also had a chance to play around a little with Motion 3, which has some great whizz-bang 3D tools built into it. I’m really impressed with what I’ve managed to get from it so far, and can see some great possibilities for creative work further down the line – especially compositing stuff in 3D space.

A while back I wrote about the woes of trying to downconvert HDV footage to standard definition for use in DVD Studio – it was one hell of a hack, and felt really clunky. When you consider how far NLE software has come in recent years, it seems odd that it becomes a really painful process when you want to publish your work to various formats. Also, I’d completely abandoned trying to use Compressor, since it didn’t seem to be compatible with PowerPC chipsets on OS X Leopard anymore (that was a painful lesson to learn after upgrading to version 10.5 of the OS). Instead, I’d resorted to using VisualHub – it has a really impressive feature-set, runs fast, but is not a very pretty application. That just added to the feeling of a clunky workflow, and made the whole process of rendering anything feel like a chore, rather than just a simple task.

It would appear that with the latest release of FCP and Compressor 3, all of this kludging is no longer necessary. Hooray! Creating M2V files for import into DVD Studio is now a very simple process – no need for converting to an intermediate codec and clicking on mystical settings in the depths of Final Cut’s option panes. It’s still not the fastest of processes, even with QMaster running, but at least I know I can choose the options, hit Submit and know that the file I’m after will pop out the other end when it’s done; no more worrying about whether I’ve forgotten to check a certain checkbox, or change a certain setting; no more sitting at 2am, waiting for a freshly rendered DVD, which is the product of a 4 hour rendering process, hoping to any god that might be listening that it is interlaced properly so that I don’t have to start the whole process again.

There’s a lot to be said for having a reliable, easy-to-use workflow. Not only does it help to prevent things from going wrong, it allows me to apply more effort and brainpower to the creative task at hand. A good creative tool should help you to achieve a creative vision in the most unobtrusive way possible, so that it is almost synergistic with your thoughts and ideas. It shouldn’t be a hindrance, nor should it be an overriding influence. Final Cut Studio 2 is getting there – especially the way you interact with Motion – and the improvements in rendering workflows are making me very happy (well, as happy as one can be about rendering workflows).

Editing is a breeze, and since we set up our new company, we decided that in order to future-proof all of our work, and to attain the highest quality video footage, we’d put an HDV workflow in place.  That means that we shoot in HDV, and we edit HDV.  That way we can distribute HD resolution video online, and be prepared for when we’re (finally) able to produce HD resolution DVDs.

But it introduces a sticky element to our workflow, which ought to be easy to negotiate, but which can really clog up the whole process.  Having all this HD resolution footage around is great, but we need to create DVDs to distribute our films, and to prepare stuff for broadcast.  And Final Cut makes that really, really difficult.

In the past, I’ve used Compressor to render MPEG files ready for use in a DVD project.  But there’s three snags with that:

1. Compressors rendering quality is pants.
2. There’s some voodoo you have to carry out in order to deinterlace the source video in Compressor.
3. It’s really slow.

And I’ve been forced to completely abandon the Final Cut > Compressor > DVD Studio workflow entirely since upgrading to Mac OS X Leopard, since Compressor no longer works (thanks Apple – as far as I know, this is something which Apple are aware of, but are only fixing in newer, Intel versions of Final Cut Studio).

That could have been a really nasty brick wall to have hit, and for a while I was a little lost with Compressor.  I trialled a few other programs which were meant to do a similar job, but they just didn’t cut the mustard.  I was ready to break stuff, until I realised that DVD Studio Pro has it’s own renderer built-in – and from what I can tell it’s much faster, and better than the one found in Compressor.

But, there’s a fly in the ointment.  If you take a HDV file and throw it at Compressor, it’ll happily import it and allow you to work with it just like any other asset.  But when it comes to render, there’s a serious problem with deinterlacing, where you get strange shimmers appearing in some shots, and some really ugly jitters in others.  It just doesn’t work as a method for downconverting.

That’s when I stumbled across the Bonsai method.  This technique is absolute genius, and gets around all the problems, with a pretty fast workflow.  The theory goes:

1. Create a standard definition timeline, using the DV50 codec.
2. Drop your HDV footage into that DV50 timeline – Final Cut will deal with all of the rescaling and de-interlacing.
3. Export the timeline.
4. Import it into DVD Studio

Et voila!  It sounds simple, and in essence it is.  There’s just a few settings which might trip you up along the way, and I’ve had to experiment with using a few different settings to get good results.

I’ve converted the workflow so that I generate PAL footage, and here’s a brief step-by-step guide to what to do to get HDV footage onto a SD DVD.

First you need to create your sequence for the downconversion:

1. You should have your finished edit in a HDV or Apple Intermediate Codec sequence.
2. Create a new timeline, and call it something like “Final Edit – DV50″.
3. Make sure you have this sequence selected (sometimes Final Cut can be picky over editing settings on something you haven’t selected) – just click on the sequence timeline to make sure it’s at the forefront.
4. Go to “Sequence settings”.
5. At the bottom of the settings window, click the “Easy setup” button.
6. Select “DV50 PAL 48 kHz Anamorphic”.
7. Back in the sequence setting window, make sure that “Field dominance” is set to “Upper (Odd)”.  This will save you a world of pain when it comes to importing into DVD Studio.
8. Click the “Video processing” tab.
9. Towards the bottom, you’ll see a “Motion filtering quality” setting.  Set this to “Fastest (linear)”.  This makes sure that your deinterlaced image doesn’t look like it was done on an Etch-a-Sketch!
10. Drag your master sequence (your HDV one), and drop it into the DV50 sequence.  Final Cut will scale your footage anamorphic DV resolution.
11. View the master sequence in the viewer (select it in your timeline and hit return).just check the Filters tab for the sequence, as Final Cut can be prone to add a Field Shift filter if you haven’t set the field dominance correctly – you don’t want that, as it’ll cause headaches later on, and add time to the rendering process.

That’s all the tricky stuff out of the way, you can now go ahead and export a master copy:

1. Select “Export > Quicktime Movie”.
2. Make sure “Make movie self-contained” is selected (else you’ll end up with reference movies, and that’ll open a world of pain for you).
3. Don’t change any other settings – you want to be exporting with the default codecs for the sequence.
4. Go make some coffee.

Once your file’s rendered, just give it a check.  It’ll play in Quicktime et al in 4:3, so will look all squashed – that’s just because it’s an anamorphic file – we’ll be stretching it out again in DVD Studio.

Final step is to import this footage into DVD Studio Pro:

1. With your DVD Studio project open, select “Import” and locate your file.
2. In your asset viewer, right-click on the video file, and choose “Encoder settings…”
3. It should be set by default, but just make sure that “Field Order” is set to “Top”.  This makes sure that the interlacing of the MPEG encoded file will be the same as your source file.
4. Set “Aspect ratio” to “16:9″.  This will stretch your footage back to it’s original size.

And that, should be that!  Work with your assets just like you would for any other DVD project, and when you come to build and format your discs, they ought to play back with crystal-clear clarity.

Some things to note:

• It really is worth always checking your DVD builds on a proper cathode TV.  A lot of the time, the scanning of LCD monitors will hide nasty interlacing problems, and you won’t be able to tell if things have gone astray.
• I’m working with Final Cut Pro 5 – I’ve not had a chance to upgrade to version 6, so couldn’t say whether this process works in the latest version – or indeed, whether this whole process is no longer needed.
• There are other elements of the Bonsai Method, such as applying a channel blur to reduce flicker.  I’ve not felt the need to use these, but it’s worth reading about them, as they could be useful to you.

So now, I’m happy because I have a full HD to SD workflow back in place, and it works much faster and with better results than the Compressor workflow I’ve used in the past.  It may not be the best way to do this process, but it’s the best I’ve found so far.  It’s interesting that this is a workflow which Apple shys away from discussing or documenting on their website, or in any of their documents.

I’d be interested to here any input from anyone who has suggestions on improving this process – or indeed from anyone with a quicker, easier alternative.