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Can anyone get excellent HD to SD results?
Hi all,
I can’t no matter what I try, get a decent HD/HDV to SD downconvertion.
Before I go any futher I have done several searches, in this forum, and although their have been some posts about this, I have not found a solution.
Have been using Vegas since version 2.
All my results wether I shot HDV or HD are lousy!!!
Allow me to explain. Whilst the HD footage looks brilliant downconverted to SD it looks soft and wide shots even look out of focus. Plus I have that horizontal line flicker problem in SD.
I don’t have ridiculos expectations.
Am not expecting HD/HDV footage when downconverted to SD to look like HD/HDV.
I do however expect it to look as good as my previous SD camera, the Sony Z7. The Z7 is 1/3″ and my EX-1 is 1/2 inch with better glass.
Have spoken to Sony, who told me that to get a good result one must use hardware.
If Clip Browser would do a decent job of exporting to AVI, life would be so much simpler. Was hoping 2.5 would fix this.
Was hoping Vegas 9 would do a better job of it that V8.
Using a Sony camera/codec & Sony software, one would think it would be easy.
Most of my productions the clients only ever want SD DVD.
I was under the dissaloution that starting in HD would result in brilliant SD dvd’s.
Had I have known, that Vegas can’t do a decent job of downconverting, I would have never bought the EX1.
I think a $1000 consumer camera shooting in SD would produce comparible if not better dvd’s.
Have been surfing the net for months, made so many calls,even tried other NLE’s.
From tests I have done I think anything using the “Main concept” codec can’t do a decent job.
I would love someone to prove me wrong.
As I find myself contemplating selling the EX1 and going back to the Z7, something I don’t really want to do.
To clarify I shoot 1920 or 1440 in 50i, am a PAL user.
My dvd’s authoured in DVDA 5.0, are CBR 8mbps. This has always created great results when the footage has been SD.
Could someone please, please help.Cheers
Colin Andronis -
3 Replies
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> I find myself contemplating selling the EX1 and going back to the Z7
This is really very strange and puzzling. I have seen several of these posts where Sony EX1 shooters are complaining about not being able to get a good SD downconvert. I have a Sony Z1 and my downconverted DVD’s are spectacular. Far superior to anything an SD camera could have produced. You even said yourself that your Sony Z7 did a better job. How could this be? And the fact that you tried other NLE’s and got the same results all points to something about the Sony EX1 footage but that defies logic. How could the footage be the issue?
I wonder if it’s a PAL issue? Both NTSC and PAL HD are 1920×1080 yet NTSC gets resized to 780×480 while the same PAL image gets resized to 720×576. 1080 / 480 = 2.25 while 1080 / 576 = 1.875. Perhaps it’s the conversion of this .875 that causes the softening of the image. It’s not an even number like .25 (which is 1/4 frame). But that wouldn’t explain why your Z7 gave good results. 🙁
Sorry I don’t have any answers but it’s odd that a lot of EX1 shooters are complaining about this same issue that the rest of us HD shooters don’t seem to have.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I see that the previous post from John makes reference to his Z1 as producing excellent SD results. The Z1 can down-convert in camera from HD to SD, whereas the EX1 doesn’t have that facility to down-convert. I often wondered why Sony didn’t provide this facility on the EX1 – perhaps the reason is, as John mentions, the conversion factor of .875.
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I have an EX3 and find 3 factors that have helped me to get excellent looking SD-DVDs with Vegas 8:
1.- always render (to mpeg2 DVD) with BEST quality (I used to go with “good” with previous SD cameras…..)
2.- Stay progressive (project and render) if you shoot that way…
3.- Try Variable Bit Rate… and even experiment with 2 pass ….
good luck
Enrique Orozco R.
iDEA DigitalVideoStudio
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