Adventures in HDV

I have to admit that I’m still one of those people who does not have a HDTV set. Maybe some day when one of ours goes out, my wife decides to rearrange our living room, or in the most extreme case, they decide to put something of quality on HDTV that I’m interested in.

Since I received my Canon HV-30 I have pretty much been shooting in the DV mode. This was testing and family scenes, the latter of which would end up on a DVD anyway (HDV cannot yet be put on a DVD. Maybe someday when a genius figures how to put short movies on them?). But on a Christmas trip to Texas I went for all HDV shooting (About a tape and a half). The scenes consisted of many, many short clips.

After returning home I hurried to capture the tapes in Premiere Pro CS3. First disappointment! My one year old HP m9060n quad-cpu computer with three GB ram couldn’t chew it all at once. The system went down to a crawl and wait. I even got off the Internet and shut down my antivirus. Worse yet, PrProCS3 brought the tape in as one big clip! Capturing in shorter sequences, I spent a lot of time cutting them into individual clips. There had to be something better than this!

I started digging into the forums and found HDVSplit mentioned with good marks. It was worth a try. HDVSplit is in beta release at the following location: http://strony.aster.pl/paviko/hdvsplit.htm.  I decided to download it and give it a try. Wow! It did a yeoman’s job on both tapes, converting the tape to many .m2t files. This is nice, I said to myself.

Then I tried to open the .m2t files to view them. Media Player? No! Nero 8? No! Back to Google with a .m2t search. That was the way I found VLC Media Player. Works fine with .m2t files, and can view a myriad of other formats too. It’s found at: http://www.videolan.org/.

One of the best things about both these app’s is that they are free.

Having discarded the clips I didn’t want to use, I found that .m2t files are no problem to import in grouped bunches into either Premiere Pro CS3 or Premiere Elements v7. While I continue to learn to use PrProCS3, I find that PrE is fully capable of handling my family and documentary movies with an ease of use compared to PrProCS3. Will let you know how the final DVD products come out from these clips.

I haven’t gone by cable to a friends HDTV set yet either. The cost range of HDMI cables is amazing. They go from dirt cheap to extravagant. Someone needs to explain this in simple terms to me.