User Guide

14 Chapter 1 Working With HDV
For example, suppose you record some typical “talking head” footage, such as an
interview in which a seated person moves very little throughout the shot. Most of the
person’s body stays still, so most of the visual information is stored in an I-frame; the
subsequent P- and B-frames store only the changes from one frame to the next.
Because P- and B-frames depend on other frames to create a meaningful image, your
computer spends more processing power decoding HDV frames for display than it does
when displaying intraframe-only formats such as DV, uncompressed video, or the Apple
Intermediate Codec.
Working With HDV in Final Cut Pro
If you’ve previously worked with DV, you’ll find that the HDV workflow is similar. There
are two basic workflows for editing HDV footage in Final Cut Pro:
 Native MPEG-2 HDV editing: If you use this method, you capture, edit, and output your
original MPEG-2 HDV data throughout the entire process. This process is referred to as
native editing because Final Cut Pro works directly with the MPEG-2 data captured from
your HDV tapes. Native HDV playback is processor-intensive because displaying a single
frame can require decoding of several frames earlier or later in the video stream. As a
result, you may be able to play back fewer real-time effects when editing in this format.
However, there are many benefits to native HDV editing:
 Native HDV editing uses less disk space because long-GOP MPEG-2 HDV video has
a very low data rate.
 Outputting HDV to tape requires little processing before output because your
video is already in the native HDV format. Only segments of your sequence that
contain cuts or effects must be re-encoded, or conformed, to create the proper
HDV GOP pattern.
This workflow is useful for cuts-only edits that you want to quickly output back to
tape, or for export to other MPEG formats. For more information, see “Native HDV
Editing Workflow,” below.
Editing HDV Using Apple Intermediate Codec
Instead of working with native MPEG-2 HDV video, you can transcode your HDV video
to the Apple Intermediate Codec during capture. The Apple Intermediate Codec is a
high-quality video codec optimized for playback performance and quality. Although
the data rate of the Apple Intermediate Codec is three to four times higher than the
data rate of the native MPEG-2 HDV, the processing requirements to play back your
video are less. Unlike MPEG-2 HDV, the Apple Intermediate Codec does not use
temporal compression, so every frame can be decoded and displayed immediately,
without first decoding other frames.