EX1 footage export for standard NTSC DVD

[Matthew Roddy]

Hopefully I’m not going against any forum mandates here by posting this link. If I am, I do humbly apologize.
Forward! I’ve been reading about this very problem on dvinfo.net. I was hoping to see other solutions here. But for your immediate question, check out this thread:
https://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=116587
They have “solutions” there, but I’m not happy reading any of them (they have to do with small amounts of Gaussian Blur, etc).
Clearly not everyone is having this problem, so what is being missed???

[Douglas Spotted eagle]

It’s a bigger issue in PAL land, but adding .001 of Gaus is a common treatment. The sharpness setting in the cam is an issue; many people foolishly crank up crispening, which is a serious mistake for any but the most wide shot, IMO. Doing so will really screw up your image, but many folks don’t see this on their less than stellar displays.

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor

[James Goodman]

Thanks for the link Matthew and was I surprised by the number of issues related to HD and HDV as I have been patiently sitting on the fence before jumping into HD. Looks like I may have been premature

I am playing around with Daniel Alexander’s set of parameters except he is PAL. So far my footage that contains a pan of downtown Vancouver with Lots of horizontal lines on the buildings looks bad. Other pans are just about ok but still any horizontal line shows twitter.

I would like to know the settings etc that Vortex used for the fabulous EX1 footage on their EX1 training DVD

[James Goodman]

Further to my quest I contacted Douglas Jensen of www. vortexmedia.com

who produced the DVD “Mastering the EX1” which I found very useful. Douglas sent me his NTSC DVD production workflow as follows

“”1) I shoot most of my footage 1080 30P HQ — but I don’t think that makes much difference in the final output.

2) I open a new Sequence in FCP and use the “DV NTSC 48Khz Anamorphic” preset. Or non-anamorphic if the output will be a 4×3 DVD . . . yes, I still do those too.

3) I change the Field Dominance to “NONE”

4) I edit the entire program within that Sequence.

5) When I’m done editing, I then Export a QuickTime movie of the Sequence. I choose “Current Settings” and I do NOT choose to “Make Movie Self-Contained”.

6) I then take that QuickTime movie and bring it into Compressor.

7) I then choose the Compressor preset for DVD Best Quality and modify a few of the settings (such as bitrate), but nothing major.

8) After that file is finished rendering, I bring it into DVD Studio Pro and author the DVD normally.

This is exactly how my EX1 DVD was produced, and it’s the workflow I’ve been using with XDCAM HD for almost two years. VERY SIMPLE. No extra software, no extra rendering, nothing special at all. I do everyting EXACTLY how I demonstrate in the EX1 DVD. “”

I followed Doug’s method but using Vegas and rendered my test as a quicktime as per above but then used Adobe Encore to transcode and burn the DVD

Best results so far and renewed my confidence for going forward with HD (still some flicker on horizontals on buildings in distance)

James