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HD Confusion
Hi All,
I’m definitely a HD newbie, although I didn’t need too, shot my latest project on HD for the heck of it, mostly to learn HD while everyone else was still on SD, but now as my delivery date looms having a lot of sleepless nights worrying about satisfying my customer who needs 100% SD.
I’ve browsed through the forums for weeks now, learned tons but still not getting an exact answer, hoping someone will be able to help me with some info:
1. Shot using both a Panasonic 302 / 202. Multiple formats (experimenting as we went along). Editing is fine, finally managed to capture everything in FCP (after a lot of reading)
2. Despite obvious quality difference between the AVC-I 50 / 100 / DVCPRO HD formats, managed to get everything looking acceptable (wish I had just stuck to AVC-I 100 or DVCPRO HD now in afterthought)
3. Editing with FCP 6.06 on a MacPro with a Blackmagic Decklink hooked up to a sony Beta VTR
4. I need to output to SD – Digital Betacam 4:3 (Everything was shot with 4:3 framing in mind, so I have no problem with losing some looking room/headroom
5. So far from what I’ve gathered in the forums my best option would be to:
A. In FCP Copy and paste my edited HD timeline to a new 10bit PAL timeline
B. Magnify the picture so the black letterbox is totally out of 100% safe area
C. Render everything 10bit
D. Dump out to tape as normalQ1. I’ve done this as a test but the result wasn’t fantastic, wondering if there is a better way to do this, or is this my best bet? When I say not fantastic, the “soft” created by the magnification, makes the footage look like it was shot on DV or worse. Is this because its a software render in FCP or would a hardware render be something better to explore?
Q2. Is there something that i might have missed during ingest into FCP (from Raw P2) that could have made me lose unnecessary quality? I stored all the raw p2 data off the camera. I Log and transferred in FCP from Raw P2 into the standard Apple ProRes 4:2:2
Q3. If I’m outputting on Digital Beta anyway, should I have just stuck to shooting in 4:3 in the first place (was thinking of future proofing, but after all the quality hassle not sure its worth it)
Any input n advice on this most welcome, thanks!
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2 Replies
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Is your Blackmagic card a HD card? if it is it should be able to do the downconvert on the fly. Make sure everything is rendered in your timeline, set the HD to SD downconvert to Pan and Scan (Center Crop) on the card and go to the deck. This is the fastest and cleanest way to do this.
You should never “Experiment” on a live project, especially with different codecs. You need to pick one and stay with that one.
P2 transfer is what it is, HQ is a higher bitrate but most people don’t seem to think there is much difference in the end when coming from this type of source. WIth DVCProHD you are just rewrapping the MXF files into QT so there is no transcoding.
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Hi Michael Sacci,
Thanks for the tips, appreciate the input. YES NEVER mix around your codecs! I learned the hard way… more confidant after doing some tests for final delivery now. Pan and Scan seems the best way to go without messing around with software downconversion
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