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Getting SD to look best on HDTV
I’m working on a 1-minute video loop for a client which I’m building in After Effects. The video consists of type, video, stills, and a lot of motion during transitions. I’m building this in Standard definition widescreen, since they will be distributing it on DVD. Naturally, they will be playing it on huge 60″ Plasma HDTV’s…. and this is what I’m presenting it to them on tomorrow.
I’ve rendered it out of AE using the Animation (uncompressed) codec, then brought that into DVD Studio Pro, and encoded it at 6.5 Mbps bit rate. Burned to a standard DVD.
Playing back on my HDTV it looks pretty chunky. The fonts are a bit jaggy, the video is marginal quality, etc. I guess what you’d expect playing SD video on a quality HDTV.
Does anyone have any advice or tips on how to best output this so it looks it’s best possible on an HDTV? How do I explain this to the client when/if they comment about the poor quality image?
Thanks!
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4 Replies
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I’ve done this many times without a problem, the typical use is for a trade show display.
My Comps in AE are set to 854 x 480 square, pixels at 23.976 fps. I render these out with no compression and bring them into DVDSP. The track resolution is 720 x 480i.
These look great on 60″ plasmas.
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Can I ask why you’re building an HD project at SD size? I know SD is easier to work with, but if your end goal is HD, you should be working at an HD size.
If you need to upres, maybe consider getting an up-rezzing plug-in for AE such as Digital Anarchy’s ReSizer or Red Giant Software’s Instant HD. These plug-ins are used for up-rezzing video so that you can work with SD video in an HD sized Comp with significantly less loss, however it’s not perfect.
Again, the best solution is to work at the right Resolution to begin with.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
arabinowitz(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com—————————————-
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Aharon of course is correct. I should have made this clear in my previous post.
In my case I’m working full screen 16×9 SD to be displayed on an HDTV.
My clients are using an SD DVD Player so there is no point is working in HD resolution.
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you didn’t give any comps specs, but i agree with brian… setting up for sd 16:9 24p should give you good results when playing out sd dvd on an hd screen.
as far as the workflow, from what i’ve read in the dvdsp forum… render to lossless animation (progressive), take it to compressor for mpeg2 (make sure setting are for progressive), take that to dvdsp to burn, again making sure that the settings are for 16:9 progressive dvd.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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