DV Bluescreen Shoot: Best Video Transfer Approach

[pasteljoe]

Hello,
I've begun a project that involves using a DV camcorder to shoot bluescreen work. My concern is how to maintain high quality in the footage so that keying with be as clean as possible. I've heard that I should not transfer the DV format video via firewire (ieee-1394). This baffles me since this format retains the video in it's original digital format. I read on rec.video.production that I should transfer in "analog". Now I'm lost. Could some kind soul please school me in the ways of cleanly doing this transfer?

Thanks Muchly.

Cheers,
Douglass Turner
email: turner@landmat.com

[toxic-xsr]

I shoot alot of stuff on DV and i've heard the same thing and here is the reasoning. Basically, when you transfer DV matrial through firewire you reatain the same footage quality however DV video has a very sharp contrast and tends to produce color banding artifacting making it difficult to pull a matte out of it. They say that you should transfer the footage to an analog format, because it tend to smooth out your picture blending in the artifacting to produce a cleaner blue or green hence you can pull your mattes more cleanly. I've tried it once and it does work again it depends how well you shoot your orginal footage. I shot on an XL1 trasnfer to 3/4 then back to DigitalBetacam and its seemed to work alright.

Doc

[mayniak]

using the DV video format is not a good idea because shake HATES it!! All you have to do is take the DV formatted video files into premiere and convert them to TGA sequences and you should have no prob. That always works great for me.

[deke-kincaid]

DV can be bad for blue/green screen work because of its 4:1:1 nature. I still like Beta for all bluescreen work, but there are many pages showing how to get good results out of DV with a bluescreen. IIt just takes alot longer to pull a nice key and clean up.
Here are a few links with information about the problem and workarounds:

http://www.greatdv.com/post/bluescreendv1.htm
http://www.neopics.com/bluescreen/

Deke