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DeckLink 486 lines to NTSC DVD?
I’ve got a DeckLink SP and have mastered a PAL project in the 8-bit YUV codec. I’m converting our PAL footage to NTSC for a DVD release, and I notice that the Premiere Pro DeckLink NTSC project defaults to 486 lines instead of 480. To anyone that has run into this before: What is the common way of handling this? I see two options:
1. Transcoding to 486 lines, then cropping to 480 for DVD
2. Transcoding to 480 lines and hoping PPro/DeckLink doesn’t blow a fuse
I would prefer option #2 because it would save time/space(/money), but I have a feeling it’s not going to work. Any advice/tips before I start my workflow? I have terabytes of footage to process and I want to get this right before I begin.
Any advice at all is appreciated, thanks!
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5 Replies
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720×486 is the standard resolution for D1/NTSC. It is found on Digibeta, D2, D5, etc. 720×480 is the size used for DV and DVD.
The proper way to handle it is to crop 2 lines from the top and 4 from the bottom, or 4 from the top and 2 from the bottom Most applications aren’t smart so they will automatically crop 3 from the top and 3 from the bottom, which is bad because it throws off the field dominance. Or they will scale it which is even worse.
Final Cut Pro automatically takes care of this, and properly handles 480 media on 486 timelines, and vice-versa. It’s built in Media Manager also recognizes this issue and takes care of it. I don’t remember if Premiere Pro does this as well.
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I’m using Premiere Pro. Although I can work in a generic 720×480 “video for windows” configuration, I would really like to avoid doing that as I’ll lose the realtime video output of my DeckLink SP (and I can’t check field order without it).
Unless anyone else has any better suggestions (and please pipe up if you do!), the only way I can figure out how to work this is to:
1. Pad my 480-line footage to 486 lines by adding 2 at top and 4 at bottom
2. Work with the footage in a 486-line project
3. Crop the top 2 and bottom 4 lines of the finished product before encoding to MPEG-2
This is going to take up literally terabytes of temporary disk space and weeks of my time unless I can find a better solution — isn’t there a way to pad/”de-pad” the footage from within Premiere Pro?
I should note that I am *not* on the latest DeckLink driver — it’s always bad mojo to change drivers in the middle of a project. However, the PAL phase of this project is done, so is there a driver update that lets the realtime video output feature work with 480-line projects?
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You’re thinking about it too much ;). I’m sure just about everyone has to do this as part of their workflow (native DV editing, Decklink monitoring, DVD output).
The Decklink supports native DV playback on Macs, and I’m 99% sure it can do it in Premiere as well. You don’t have to manually crop or add lines.
Sean
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Actually, Premiere Pro (1.5) does NOT work well with this. If you edit in D1 (486), the media encoder will not retain crop settings for MPEG2 encoding, and you get an error every time you try to do the 2/4 line crop thing, and the DVD encoding fails. Ran into it last month. Posted a bug report to Adobe, and no response. Which I have to say has become typical of Adobe of late.
Sorry to be such a downer,
Jeff -
So how did you eventually work around it?
I found an avisynth import plugin for Premiere Pro 1.5 that is free and actually works, so I may get around this by loading NOT my actual footage but rather the footage wrapped in a script that does an AddBorder(0,2,0,4) to pad the footage. At least that way I can edit without PPro doing any stretching, etc. I’ll have to find a way to auto-crop those lines out during encoding; it won’t be with Adobe’s media encoder, that’s for sure.
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