• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Resolution Difficulties Transferring P2 Footage to DVD

  Posted by Nathan Southern on November 2, 2011 at 5:25 pm

  Hi All,

  I’m having a technical problem doing some footage transfers and I’m hoping that someone can offer suggestions on this. Here is the situation:

  -I just came off of a documentary shoot with about 12 hours of interview footage (divided into individual sequences averaging 1 hour each) shot on a Panasonic HPX 3100, 1080p, 24 fps, using Panasonic P2 memory cards. I’ve imported the footage into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 without any apparent difficulties.

  Now I’m trying to use Premiere and Encore CS5.1 to transfer this unedited footage, one sequence at a time, into a format that I can burn to DVDs. Actually I need to make two sets of DVDs of rushes – one of PAL footage (to send to my director/co-producer, who is based in Europe) and one of NTSC footage (for me!) I’m using Sequence #1 as a test squence.

  The actual exportation per se is working, but something is very wrong with the resolution. When I do the export – and I’ve tried this with a number of different changes in settings, including doing it as PAL and doing it as NTSC – I get a significant reduction in visual quality ranging from various degrees of pixillation to a series of tiny horizontal lines visible whenever the interviewee moves. I’ve tried interlaced and non-interlaced. This does not seem to help.

  Here are the presets that I’m using:

  Video Settings
  Frame size: 1440h 1080v (1.3333)
  Frame rate: 23.976 fps
  Pixel Aspect Ratio: HD Anamorphic 1080 (1.333)
  Fields: No Fields (Progressive Scan)

  16:9 progressive scan 1080p HD video at 23.976 fps
  48kHz Audio

  Export Settings:
  Format MPEG2
  Preset: NTSC DV High Quality
  Output: NTSC 720×480, 29.97fps, Quality 4.0, Lower
  MPEG, 224 kbps, 48 kHz, 16 bit, Stereo
  VBR, 1 pass, Min. 2.50, Target 4.20, Max 600 Mbps

  Source: Sequence, Sequence 01
  1440×1080 (1.3333), 25 fps, Upper, 01:11:57:23
  48000, Stereo

  Neither Use Maximum Render Quality, Use Previews, or Use Frame Blending are checked.

  Now I realize that I’m downgrading the resolution of the video somewhat, so some reduction in quality is inevitable, but this particular reduction looks too extreme to me. If I match the export settings perfectly to the original file settings, I don’t get any visible degradation in quality, of course, BUT the file size increases from around 3 gigs to around 8.5 gigs – in other words, far too big for one DVD. I’m not worried about getting the exact same resolution on my output files, but what I am worried about is being able to create DVDs from these rushes with high enough visual quality that I can generally match the look of a standard DVD that one would buy commercially, where pixillation and horizontal lines interrupting the action are not a serious distraction.

  Can anyone offer suggestions? If so I would be very grateful, as there is still a lot of footage to encode and we’re rapidly losing time!

  Many thanks,

  Nathan

  Tim Kolb replied 14 years, 9 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Chris Tompkins

  November 2, 2011 at 10:19 pm

  How large a file do you have when completed?

  VBR, 1 pass, Min. 2.50, Target 4.20, Max 600 Mbps

  Target 4.20 seems a bit low for a 1 hour.
  Also, 2 pass VBR, best will always be better.

  Inch up your data rate until you’re hitting the 4.2GB mark or so.
  This will give you the best quality you can fit on a DVD-R.

  Chris Tompkins
  Video Atlanta LLC
• 

  John-michael Seng-wheeler

  November 2, 2011 at 11:38 pm

  Source: Sequence, Sequence 01
  1440×1080 (1.3333), 25 fps, Upper, 01:11:57:23
  48000, Stereo

  Why is your 24p video in a 25fps interlaced sequence? (and then being rendered to 29.97…)

  Try rendering a MPEG-2 from a sequence that matches your footage, and up the data rate like Chris Suggested. (for a one hour DVD try a target of 7 and Max of 8)
• 

  Tim Kolb

  November 3, 2011 at 3:31 pm

  This was my thought as well…it appears your 24p footage is on a 25i sequence, which is already funky, and then going down to 29.97i standard def is just the icing on the artifact…er…cake.

  First off…you said the footage is P2 but you didn’t say whether it was DVCProHD or AVC-intra…that makes a resolution difference right there.

  Check the footage settings and find out the status of pixel dimension, pixel aspect, and framerate (as well as codec, though this isn’t as important as the first three) on your source footage.

  TimK,
  Director, Consultant
  Kolb Productions,

  Adobe Certified Instructor

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