Down Scaling HD project for SD DVD- AE or Compressor?

[Sascha Engel]

That sounds all great, but as you said- PC based. So, it does not help me a lot.

Sascha

[Matt Burrows]

This is all really helpful information but there’s still one thing I don’t understand that doesn’t seem to be covered in this thread- If you’re working in an HD timeline and down-converting to SD what about the difference in field order??

If HD is upper first and SD is lower first, at what point in the workflow is the conversion to lower fields first supposed to happen?

I tried the methods discussed in this thread and the quality difference is stunning but in my case I’m still seeing what appears to be a field dominance mismatch in my conversion to SD. If I can get this part straight, my problems will be solved.

The only woman I’m pimping is sweet lady propane! And I’m tricking her out all over this town.

[Matt Burrows]

This is all really helpful information but there’s still one thing I don’t understand that doesn’t seem to be covered in this thread- If you’re working in an HD timeline and down-converting to SD what about the difference in field order??

If HD is upper first and SD is lower first, at what point in the workflow is the conversion to lower fields first supposed to happen?

I tried the methods discussed in this thread and the quality difference is stunning but in my case I’m still seeing what appears to be a field dominance mismatch in my conversion to SD. If I can get this part straight, my problems will be solved.

[Sascha Engel]

Well, the field issue wasn’t a part of the discussion, since all my HD material was progressive and so O wanted the SD to be as well. First of all why you want to change the field order? As far as I know if your HD is upper first, you can leave that also for SD. Besides, why not creating first a progressive from the Upper field first anyhow, since to my taste progressive always looks better.

[Carl Schuurbiers]

Maybe there are other options?

I switched from FCP to Premiere, about the same time as I was getting HD footage instead of SD. I was shocked at the poor quality of the SD output that one gets from HD footage. (moire, aliasing, jaggies..)

If I do some “pre-processing” of the HD material myself before scaling, I get slightly better results, but I find the result still disappointing. Going the avisynth way I don’t really find an acceptable workflow, but it shows that one should be able to get better results with software in general.

At the moment I am using one of the cheaper Blackmagic cards (Decklink SDI) so I can’t really test hardware downconversion.

I would like to ask people with Kona 3G cards: Is the hardware downconversion in the card much better than any software? Have you compared it to what comes out of Adobe Media Encoder for instance?

Has anybody had a chance to try the Teranex processor in the version as it is sold now by Blackmagic? Better than the Kona, similar?

Last question: Have the software makers forgotten about SD? Why is the quality mediocre? Why are there no third-party solutions that do a good quality down-conversion in SOFTWARE?

If buying the Kona will get me a good quality conversion I would seriously think about getting one, but I would much rather have a software solution. It feels a bit funny to have to play something out in realtime and capture the file on another device and then transfer it back again, just for the downconversion?

I would be very grateful for some opinions about this subject.

Thanks,
Carl.

[Brent Hilgenkamp]

I keep seeing everyone mention Kona cards for the best downconversion. How exactly does this workflow go? Are you laying to tape and then capturing that, or is there some type of utility AJA ships with it to avoid going to tape first?