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Converting DVCPROHD to SD (nicely)
Hey Friends,
I’ve been trying to convert some DVCPRO HD footage to SD in a million different ways. What I usually do is just export it through quicktime pro as dvcprohd (letterboxed) and it’s fine, or at least, no one has complained. One client complained that there are tiny little squares popping up, almost as if the whole image becomes pixelated for brief moments. He is right but there is no ryhme or reason to when it happens. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
By the way when I export as animation codec or 8bit uncompressed it looks stellar… but when I downconvert that to dv ntsc it looks like butt again.
Thanks in advance.
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1 Reply
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Louis Sparre: By the way when I export as animation codec or 8bit uncompressed it looks stellar… but when I downconvert that to dv ntsc it looks like butt again.
You just answered your own question! DV NTSC throws our half you color (it’s 4:2:0), then it compresses your video down to 2.5MB/sec (audio at 1MB/sec) for a total data throughput of roughly 3.5MB/sec.
You DVCProHD footage is 4:2:2, has roughly five times the pixel resolution and uses a professional, modern codec that….while using a high compression ratio…is far more efficient at how it compresses. I believe DVCProHD is typically 100Megabits/sec (10MB) and it compares pretty well to Cineform and Apple ProRes in terms of quality and compression ratio.
Try using DVCPro50 instead of DV. It’s 4:2:2 and only 3:1 compression (roughly 50Megabits/sec or 5MB, hence the 50 designation). Or…use H264…it looks incredibly good at data rates as low as 25Mbits/sec. I believe in Quicktime Pro you would use 2500 as the data rate as it uses Kilobits instead of Mbits or Mbytes as it’s designation.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog
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