POV.1 in the edit suite

Hey guys.

I make action videos for a living - Windsurf, Kitesurf and radio Control stuff mostly.

I recently got a Vio POV.1 - great unit and a design that my riders and i are happy to use - WAAY better than the full backpack, camcorder , battery packs and wires my old helmet cam required

- my only issue is the MPEG4 format and relatively low data rate (3mbs vs the 25mbs for mini DV, and 50mbs that my DVCPROHD codec uses)

no problem getting the footage in to Final Cut (my editor of choice) - but any editing (slo mo , color correction) and it all goes wrong.

As you guys have production experience AND If this isnt giving away any trade secrets - Can you guys pass on any transcoding or upressing as well as color correcting tweaks to work with the footage more smoothly on the timeline?

I'd like to get it looking as good as the mini DV from my old helmet cam -if possible.

I'm sure these tips would allow lots of crew to get more out of their POV.1 s on the edit timeline.

All the best

Reflex Films
OZ

can't help you with Final Cut but i did experience some quirks in windows movie maker when using the POV clips directly. but what i do as part of my workflow is to cut down the original clips into "edit" clips (trimming out the junk) and saving the edit clips as "high quality NTSC" which is WMV for windows movie maker. then when making my movie, i use the WMV edits rather than the original clips. WMM likes WMV files better.

so maybe try something similar to put the original clips is an alternate (more edit friendly) format. you could even convert them to uncompressed AVI if needed (but obviously going from MP4->AVI isn't going to improve the quality).

2 centimes

mpeg streamclip.

For those of you out there with POV1s that need to do any color correction , retiming (twixtor rules at this) then you need to transcode the POV files to something Final Cut can work with natively.

here is a link on the work flow - this works nicely!

http://www.finalcutuser.com/2008/07/...final-cut-pro/

i also reccomend dropping the mid tones a little (final cuts color corrector does this easily) if you arent using ND filters - the cam tends to run the mids a little too hot and color / contrast gets dropped - possibly due to snow / sand / sunny lighting with super hot hilights.

Sorry to answer my own question - but i think this well help alot of crew out there


If anyone has any upressing tips - i am all ears!

I do not know the exact settings we use, but we run everything through compressor to make them DVCPRO HD clips, which then works well with our HD footage. Running through compressor is key, but it takes time.

http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html is another free converter you can try. It gives you more freedom than mpeg streamclip if you're looking to go the cheap route.