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Downconversion quality!
We’ve been having some problems with the quality of the downconversion.
Found out that the Decklink HD single link board we purchased only does software down conversion and the resulting signal is incredibly blurred to the point of being useless.
So…. we subsequently tried out the 4:4:4 board with hardware conversion build in. Very dissapointing!
And just as blurred!! We tried every thinkable combination of system prefs setup, both hardware and software, and easysetups. With no luck!What on earth are we doing wrong??? The original HDCAM footage (1080 25PsF) looks brilliant in HD but terrible when downconverted. So we have taken the painstakingly slow route of exporting via Compressor 2 with best settings everywhere. The result is so much better. Allthough we do get a lot of aliasing in certain areas that we have to deflicker.
What gives ?
greetings
Steen Dongo
Steen Dongo
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4 Replies
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I’ve had the same problem but found the solution…
Open a new 50i HD project and import the footage you have already and watch the SD quality now…should look great.
What i found out is that when you choose the 25p preferences you only see one field = half the resolution on the downconversion out.
It is a bug in the current driver i think.
So only use 50i even if your footage is progressive.Regards
Tony -
Thanks for replying Tony !
Well… this is the weird part of it!
We’ve been editing in 1080i 50 all along. Our footage is shot on the Sony HDW 750 HDCAM as 25PsF which in reality (and electrically) is 50i. And our Easy setup for the projects when both digitizing and editing is the BlackMagic 1080i 50Hz setup. (Upper field first, Apple 10 bit uncompressed, square pixels and all that.) But no matter what we do, it looks like someone’s been having a ball with a jar of vaseline on our monitor. (Sony BVM 21 something as far as I recall.) It still looks so blurred.I was on the brink of demanding that we buy the 4.4.4 board but luckily I tried it out first. It’s no better than the software solution to my eyes.
UNLESS offcourse we’re doing something wrong. But for the life of me I simply can’t see what it should be !!
(Just for the record: We maintain working with the 1050i 50Hz setup while downconverting. We haven’t changed the Easy setup:)
greetings
Steen
Steen Dongo
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Well i posted earlier that the antialiasing on the downcoverted output is so strong but been told that the guys were working on the PCI-Express boards at the moment and would get back to other things soon…
You can give it a try by opening an SD project and importing HD footage and scaling down by 40%, the output should look flickery but very high in resolution.
Hope we have them back soon.
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That’s basically the same thing that we’ve already done by exporting via Compressor 2 and using the advanced framecontrols for antialiasing etc. But man it’s slow when scaling in such high quality. Something like 48 hours for a ten minute piece. Bordering to the unuseable 🙂
I really hope they’ll adress this when they get the time. As it is now, I for one can’t use it.
Thanks anyway for your advice 🙂
greetings
Steen
Steen Dongo
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