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Down-Converting HD to SD
I have a Sony CX-500V camcorder. I have been recording my daughter’s hockey games at the highest setting available which is 1920×1080 (16M). I am keeping the native relevent clips of my daughter’s highlights unchanged. I am making an end of the year highlights DVD for all of the members of the team. In order to do this I will be downconverting to NTSC DV widescreen. The final DVD will be around 20-30 minutes. I would like to have the highest quality possible for the DVDs.
I have been searching the forum and am a bit overwhelmed at this point. From what I have gathered thus far, it would be preferable for me to render at CBR 8,000,000 rather then VBR two-pass and also to consider using sharpen fx at the light setting. I also believe that I would be fine with 8-bit pixel format rather then 32-bit as I have not recorded in x.v.color. Rendering quality set to best may be of some additional benefit. I’m not certain what is the best setting for the motion blur type or which deinterlace method would be preferable. I suspect that for hockey it may be interpolated.
My question is what are the best settings in order for me to achieve the highest quality video possible when downconverting? There are numerous settings both in the properties and rendering custom sections which can be a bit overwhelming. Any additional tips would be appreciated as well. Thanks for any assistance.
-Mark
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6 Replies
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You have pretty much figured it out already. You don’t have to worry about deinterlace settings because both your AVCHD source and NTSC DV Widescreen target are interlaced formats. Since you will only have 30 minutes of video you might even bump the bit-rate to CBR 8,500,000 but I wouldn’t go over that for compatibility sake. I wouldn’t touch any other settings. The greatest contributor to quality is bit-rate so you are covered.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
John, thank you for your response. I have of course been doing quite a bit of experimenting. I have learned alot thanks to you and others on this forum and for that I am very thankful.
‘You don’t have to worry about deinterlace settings because both your AVCHD source and NTSC DV Widescreen target are interlaced formats.’
I have noticed that when I set the deinterlace option in the properties window to none that the video becomes very suboptimal. There will be a significant amount of blurring. For instance, the metal posts or dividers between the sheets of glass around the hockey rink will look very wavy as the camera moves. They actually will look more like the twin serpent of a medical staff symbol. Why does the quality get so much worse when I turn off deinterlacing?
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You are taking something that is interlaced, and then are deinterlacing it. When you are putting it on a NTSC DVD you are then taking the deinterlaced image and reinterlacing it. The conversion to and from the deinterlaced image will create these issues.
Since you are starting with a interlaced image, and your final product will be interlaced, you should not worry about changing the format.
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Sometimes Vegas may need to deinterlace to apply an effect and then re-interlace. Just leave the default interlace method and you should be fine.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
‘Since you will only have 30 minutes of video you might even bump the bit-rate to CBR 8,500,000 but I wouldn’t go over that for compatibility sake.’
I have an additional question regarding this. In setting the CBR, is this recommendation dependent on rendering audio plus video (NTSC DVD Widescreen) or for a video stream only as would be used in DVD architect?
-Mark
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