OK, so you got a brand-new HDV camera… and no way (yet) to deliver all of those glorious hi-rez pixels. Blu-Ray, HD DVD, WM9… bah! Who has any of those players?? And the Internet? Unless you’re talking about projects in terms of seconds, rather than minutes or even hours, file sizes and bandwidth will kill ‘ya. So even if someone has sprung big buck$ on a 720p or 1080i HDTV, usually the only way they watch hi-def content is through the cable box or satillite feed. So what’s a shooter to do??

Deliver in SD. “What!”, you exclaim. “Why did I spend all of this money on an HDV camera if I can only deliver SD?!” Here’s why… pixels are your friend. Just because you edit in SD, doesn’t mean that all of that HDV content has to go to waste. Shoot in HDV, capture the HDV files and then edit in your deliverable resolution.

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I finally completed the video I made as a gift for a local WWII veteran. I shot it waaayy back in March ‘05, after meeting “my” veteran at a production I was doing for Dar’s Credit Union (he was one of the founding members). The man, Bill Herring, was in the storied Tenth Mountain Division, seeing combat as a rifleman, helping his Division break through the Wehrmacht’s Gothic Line in Italy, 1945.

Mr. Herring was a delight to interview, his memories still tack-sharp, providing vivid details from exactly 60 years prior to the interview. Along with 70 minutes or so of interview captured during one very long night of shooting, he provided me with several mementos from his scrapbook to photograph or scan to include in the piece… snapshots, newspaper clippings, drawings, postcards, even actual shrapnel pieces from German artillery. Regrettably, he never showed me his most-prized possession: a German Luger pistol, although I did scan the requisition papers for it.

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Well, it’s all over the Web now. Adobe is finally porting over the entire Production Studio to the Mac on its next release… said to be mid-July 2007. The big gotcha, if you read their fine print, is the availability of Premiere Pro, Encore DVD, and the brand-new Soundbooth app is only available for Intel-processor Macs. Maybe it’s not a big deal for the typical DV or HDV editor, who would/should have upgraded their hardware to an Intel processor(s) system.

Another gotcha: what about Adobe Audition? This amazing sound editing package shipped with the current version of the Studio… and is apparently being replaced with the dumbed-down Soundbooth app. And there’s been no mention of a Mac-porting for Audition at all (standalone or bundle). Tsk, tsk.

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