Examples of good quality HD-SD conversion available?

[Chris Borjis]

aliasing is the first thing I notice on a bad down conversion.

The picture should be sharp as a tack and alias free. Thats really all there is to it.

I have found that using compressor with the resize settings to highest quality, (rendering out as uncompressed or prores codec) is the only sure fire way to get good down conversion if you don’t own a Kona3 or terranex box.

[Shane Ross]

Watch most of the programming on the History Channel. We are required to shoot and deliver HD, but also Digibeta SD downconverts as well. THOSE are what air…as the channel doesn’t air in HD just yet.

Shane

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[Chris Borjis]

[Shane Ross] “.as the channel doesn’t air in HD just yet.”

but I saw your wonderful “Andrew Jackson” doc in HD.

do you mean the HD history channel is not widely deployed yet?

[Shane Ross]

It isn’t widely deployed yet. You must receive History Channel HD in order to get it…AFAIK.

Shane

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[Walter Biscardi]

[Paul Campbell] “The raw footage looks sweet, but my finished SD product looks blotchy, pixelated and blah. I need some inspirational examples of what I should be expecting.”

Are you using an AJA Kona board for your downconversion? We’re delivering materials to NBC, PBS and Food Network with some of it downconverted, in realtime, via the AJA Kona boards. Pristine broadcast quality down conversion.

If you’re using FCP to perform the downconversion just by moving from an HD to SD timeline, not going to be very clean.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Paul Campbell]

Yes, we do have an AJA Kona board. We’ve got the component video from the Kona board running to our broadcast monitor.

The problem we’re fighting is that we’ve got three different types of files that we’re editing together, which are XDCAM footage shot at 1080p, music videos ripped from dvd’s (not in HD), and graphics animation that was done by a third party (also not in HD).

This is starting to get off-topic, but I’d like to ask what workflow you’d recommend for this type of project. Since the only HD stuff we have is the Sony footage, would it make more sense to downconvert that stuff outside of FCP first (perhaps with AfterEffects), and then do my FCP editing with a SD sequence?

Thanks.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Paul Campbell] “Since the only HD stuff we have is the Sony footage, would it make more sense to downconvert that stuff outside of FCP first (perhaps with AfterEffects), and then do my FCP editing with a SD sequence?”

As I mentioned before, FCP does a terrible job of downconverting HD to SD, especially in NTSC. HD is Upper Field First. NTSC is Lower Field First. Your footage will look pretty bad after FCP gets done down converting it.

Convert your HD to SD before you start editing. I would capture through the Kona board if you can by playing the footage through that instead of just importing it as a file. We’ve done that in the past with P2 footage by laying it off to DVCPro HD tape, then recapturing it as SD for the edit.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Chris Borjis]

[walter biscardi] “NTSC is Lower Field First.”

Walter are you talking about DV?

All the pro decks I’ve dealt with (digibeta, betasp) are definitely upper field first.

I encountered this whenever compressing for dvd.
if the clips were not interpreted as upper field first I always get out of field order jitter.

[Paul Campbell]

Convert your HD to SD before you start editing. I would capture through the Kona board if you can by playing the footage through that instead of just importing it as a file. We’ve done that in the past with P2 footage by laying it off to DVCPro HD tape, then recapturing it as SD for the edit.

Interesting. The camera we use is the Sony XDCAM EX-1, that uses the 16GB SxS cards. I’ve been using the XDCAM’s xfer application to get the footage into the computer. Would you still recommend your way, or are the native files out of the XDCAM still the way to go? And if they are, how would you recommend I downconvert them once they’re in?

Thanks, Walter.

[Uli Plank]

The free MPEG Streamclip does a pretty good job downconverting in software.

Regards,

uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts