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Getting HDV to DVD
I’m an editor for a TV station and we are running Avid Media Composer 2.8.1 on PC. We are in the throws of trying to work out an HD workflow. We record footage in HDV 1080/60i, and capture and edit it in HDV 1080/59.94 Avid timelines. It looks great in the timeline, and we can lay it back to HDV tape to make a master, but other than that, we’re not sure what to do with it – how to get it off Avid into a useful format.
Downconverting through the deck with ilink produces substantial loss of quality by the time it gets to Avid. Also, down converting in Avid by capturing HDV, and then switching project settings to NTSC 30 also drastically reduces quality. It makes great HDV footage look like blurry home video. I exported an HD project as uncompressed Quicktime, and it looks perfect, but it was 20.8 GB for just a 10 minute piece, and we need to do this for 30 and 60 minute programs. I have been unable to find a way to downconvert or compress into an SD QT while maintaining aspect ratio and decent picture quality.
The goal is to have projects put onto DVD and maintain good picture quality. We reasoned that it must be possible, given that 2 hour and 30 minute movies are put onto DVD. Granted compression from film is not as noticeable as video, maybe dropping quality from amazing to great, but there’s got to be a way to get an hour worth of HDV onto a DVD without looking like crap. Otherwise there’s no point in shooting HD in the first place.
We have Sorenson Squeeze 4.0, but I am not familiar with it. Are there any options there? What’s the best workflow? Edit HD and make uncompressed QTs and then compress them for DVD? We are open to whatever software that can make this possible. Thanks for any help.
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2 Replies
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If you have Sorenson Squeeze on the same box you edit with, you should just take your final edit and mixdown your video tracks to 1 stream and your audio tracks to a stereo file. Then you can export a Quicktime reference movie (no need to output an uncompressed movie) to encode in Squeeze.
Aside from movie studios having better compression tools, movies are generally shot at 24 fps. That’s about a 20% space advantage over the frame rate you’re shooting in. That’s a direct translation to being able to fit more footage on a DVD.
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Hey, thanks a lot David. I did the QT reference and compressed to MPEG-2 in Sorenson, and it looked world’s better than the in-Avid down conversion.
Thanks again!
Joel
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