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HD to SD workflow & quality
I have the opportunity of shooting on DVCPRO100 (AJ-HDX400) at 1080/50i, and will post on Media100HD. Mastering will be to DVCPRO50 SD. Should I opt for acquiring with DVCPRO50 SD or take the plunge & try HD? I have no experience of downconverting in Media100 HD & would appreciate any advice. Is the process lossy or introduce artifacts? Programme length will be 30 mins. Will the downconvert take forever? Thanks.
G5 dual 2.7, OS10.4.4, 4G RAM
Media100 HD 10.1.3, AE 7
2.6 terra RAID -
3 Replies
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This is my intended workflow from Media 100 HD. I believe that the hardware in the system does the downconvert very well with no loss of quality together with the choice of aspect ratio (16:9 or 4:3). This is one of the features of the new HD version.
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[Sheeplove] “Should I opt for acquiring with DVCPRO50 SD or take the plunge & try HD? I have no experience of downconverting in Media100 HD & would appreciate any advice. Is the process lossy or introduce artifacts?”
Of course the process is “lossy”, since a big amount of your recorded resolution will not be digitized. But it looks very crsip and sharp; the downconverted signal from Media 100 HD really looks very good.
When doing HD work we usually start with “offline” compressed SD material, downconverted by Media 100 HD. We feed in a HDSDI signal and downconvert it to SD on acquire. Then we edit in SD 16:9, and depending of what we have to deliver we reacquire either in SD uncompressed (Media 100 HD 10bit codec), or at HD 1080i. But even if you start working with downconverted SD material you can easily reacquire in HD, and even all titles from Graffiti will translate to HD nicely.
[Sheeplove] “Will the downconvert take forever?”
There are 3 ways of downconverting. You can feed in an HDSDI signal that will get downconverted on acquire if you want (realtime), or you can acquire a 1080i HD signal and work in HD on your timeline; this can be downconverted to SD automatically on playback/mastering all the time in realtime (either as 16:9, or letterboxed or cropped depending on how you set it up). These 2 options are realtime all the time. The 3rd way would be to acquire in HD and drop the HD material on an SD timeline (or vice versa; drop SD material on a HD timeline). Then the HD material will get reconformed to SD by processing. It is still not slow but definitely not realtime, and therefore probably the slowest workflow.
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So which is the better quality if your mastering will be SD? The downconverted HD or shooting and staying in DVCPRO 50? Anybody compared the two?
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