SE rocks!

[ted]

We are doing our first High Def Lens to delivery project on SpeedEDIT.
We spent the last 3, 11 hour days with 3 clients sitting with us. All on the new SpeedEDIT 1.2. Man was I nervous. :eek:

About 300 1080i clips, a handful of quad splits, as many as 11 layers all on High Quality and SSI turned on and animated, and I can play the whole thing without a single stutter! :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

With the VT output were able to pipe the playback through our entire Edit Bay, on the Sony monitor and two lesser Panasonic monitors at each end of the edit bay. The clients nor my crew were bothered by the squeezed perspective much to my delight! The video was very good.

THEN...the client wanted to take a SD DVD back to view with them. NOT A PROBLEM.
I copied the timeline, opened a 486i timeline, pasted the timeline and wala! Well, I did have to re-position the quad splits and re-position any GFX that weren't centered. I also made some quick size adjustments to a handful of SD clips they supplied. (all on the clock). But it was way easier then I thought when I saw HD in my future a couple years back.
The whole conversion to SD took about 20 minutes for the 14 minute video. And yes, it all played real time so we played it directly into the DVD instead of needing to render it, saving even more time.

I do have a question about delivery I'll ask on another thread.

SpeedEDIT makes it a snap to produce mixed HD and SD, and deliver both.
And wouldn't you know it, I just got a call after that client left from another facility who wanted a long form HD project.
Thank You NewTek for SpeedEDIT. Not a week too early! :thumbsup:

[KSTAR]

Very cool Ted, thanks for sharing the story. That sounds like a typical scenario for me when you have to work outside of the box to get things done. Good to hear SE passed with flying colors

[ScorpioProd]

Ted, you might want to consider simply rendering the HD project to SpeedHQ at the HD resolution. This is high quality, compressed and pretty quick to render.

Then you can drop that clip in the 486i project and not have to worry about fixing ANYTHING that would have moved or changed size due to the resolution change.

[ted]

Eugene, thanks. Do you think there is a noticable quality hit doing the render option?

[ScorpioProd]

I haven't honestly tried it in SpeedEDIT 1.2 yet, but from before that, no, the quality of SpeedHQ for HD was fine.:thumbsup:

[Gary Robinson]

Hi Ted,
Did you shoot with the HVX200?

[ted]

Eugene, If you like it, I'm fine with it. :hey:

Gary, of course!

[ScorpioProd]

Thanks, Ted. :)

Of course, like everything in life, there are caveots.

For instance, it's important that the application you are going to use SpeedHQ in can read it properly. For instance, RGB applications don't always support it correctly. Mirage does, but Vegas 7 does NOT.

I think WME will see it as YUV, but just check your levels after a test encode to be sure.

I've been quite happy with SpeedHQ as a HD intermediate, I only had an issue with it once at SD, which was probably due to an issue with some illegal levels in the project I was rendering to it. But I have NEVER seen the problem in HD resolution, probably because SpeedHQ has a MUCH higher data rate for HD than for SD, which is a GOOD thing.

I won't use SpeedHQ for SD, I use Type-2 DV for that. But for HD or any resolution that needs an alpha channel, I don't hesitate to use SpeedHQ.

Heck, I've even used it to get an HDV project in SpeedEDIT into VT[4], so that I could use the TMPGEnc plug-in from VT[4] combined with downconverting inside VT[4]. Worked great! :)