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EVERYONE – lets create an HD to SD ‘shimmer’, ‘jitter’ and ‘flicker’ thread to end them all!!!
-Meant to post this in FCP forum originally but it ended up in AE forum by accident, sorry for the dup…
This plague has haunted me for more than 2 years. NO ONE has completely answered this question on the COW…I have been scouring the site and others forever to find an answer. I know I am not alone in this.
HD to SD via KONA LHe or compressor M2v files. Anything with fine lines or any nice detail at all gets completely horrible looking when down converting. Especially shots that are panning or titling. Original format doesn’t seem to matter, I have the issue with 1080i 29.97 and 720P. DVCPro and Pro-res…and I know people on here have the issue with XDCAM as well.
The only thing I have found to work is applying a guassian blur of 1 to 1.5 on every HD shot. Yes I know, applying blur to my nicely shot detailed HD footage is sabotage. But it’s my only way out. Whether I am downcoverting for MPEG2 delivery or converting for DVD, I cannot get a detailed, non flickering, jitter, shimmery footage.
I have tried using the best settings in compressor, tried doing a 16×9 progressive dvd as well as letterbox.
How do you guys preserve all the detail in your HD footage and still get a clean DVD?
BTW, I am viewing my source timeline in two ways…an HDMI signal to a flat screen (beautiful) and through a beta deck to an SD CRT monitor. The downconverted signal is always the nastiest.
Apple Certified Final Cut Pro 6
Mac Pro 3.0 Quad
Kona LHe
Panasonic HPX-2000 -
3 Replies
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Matt,
We put our 1080 30F footage into an SD timeline, let it scale itself, and we set our render settings under Video Processing to High Precision YUV, set Motion Filtering Quality to Best, and under Render Control set Quality to Best.
We never have the problems you describe, our SD DVDs are perfect.
At home I have a Kona LH, so I work in native formats, and let the card do the downconvert, again, no problems.
Have a wonderful day.
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Hi Matt,
Normally I use the same workflow than Chris to downscale in FC and the results are really good.
In Compressor, always setting the Frame Control ON.
Rafael -
Well, you will NEVER have the level of detail in SD as you do HD. I hope you know that. I know it sounds like something you should know, but I can’t make that assumption. You will not have the same level of detail in SD as you do HD. This is why people like HD…they go ‘WHOA! Look at that detail!’ And when you are very used to working with and seeing HD, as soon as you see a digibeta output, even on a good SD production monitor, you wonder ‘what happened to all my great detail?’
And if you have very fine lines, those look icky on SD. I had a documentary that used a lot of line art…looked great in HD. But when we did the SD downconvert, the line art moired like nobody’s business. It was BAD. And yes, I had to do the 1.5% blur to get it to not do that.
I haven’t had issues with juttery moves, or jittering. 720p 23.98 downconverted via Kona LH and Kona 3, and lately with MXO2 to beta or digibeta…looked fine. Pulldown was added properly by the capture cards. Since I don’t have these issues, I don’t know how to answer you if you have them.
As for DVDs…I compress directly with compressor from my DVCPRO HD 720p 23.98 masters…using the DVD presets in Compressor. I get very clean DVDs out of this. They are SD and run at 23.98…no issues. Do you try to downconvert your HD to SD somehow before you make these DVDs?
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def
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