HDV 16:9 down conversion to SD 4:3 for broadcast

Blackmagic Design

HDV 16:9 down conversion to SD 4:3 for broadcast

Posted by Anthony Miles on June 9, 2005 at 7:07 am

Dear members,
I am editing a TV spot in FCP 5 on a fast Dual G5, tiger and BM 5 drivers. I have 1080i HDV from Z1 in Native HDV 16:9. It works fine and I get RT down conversion with letter box on my SD monitor. I need a conversion that is 4:3 center cut and properly fielded. I tried the Media Manager and got a great trimmed project with BM 8 bit 16:9 uncompressed 720×486 files. It appears that it is not fielded properly or like some deinterlacing happened.

I also tried nesting the HDV sequence I an BM SD sequence and render and playback. This works fair, seems to have slight fielding issues, only noticeable on some footage.

Please suggest a workflow that is viable on the G5 and in software as I do not have the budget for a hardware converter or the time to go out of house. I suppose I can do an analog recapture off the Z1 in center crop, but I have gotten much cleaner result with down converting the HDV with Mpeg stream clip but to 720×486 16:9. When I try and squeeze it and scale it to fill 4:3 pan and scan in the canvas it seems to get very soft. Is there a better way?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,
Anthony Miles

Anthony Miles
DP, editor

Anthony Miles replied 20 years, 11 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Jeff Brown
June 9, 2005 at 1:29 pm

1st a disclaimer: I’m a PC guy (3d & mogfx), and the only thing I know about FCP is that some of my clients love it…
But, I have heard that the scaling in FCP is less than ideal. If you want to do a pan & scan, one workaround that comes to mind is to use After Effects (or combustion, etc.). You could properly deal with field issues/conversion, and have much better scaling. Not the fastest route, but if you already have the software…

-jeff
Anthony Miles
June 9, 2005 at 6:51 pm

Thanks. I have Motion 2 so I am trying this very thing but in motion and bringing the motion project into FCP. It looks pretty good, seems to retain the resolution very well. Gives slight interlace twiter on horiz. lines. It seems to deinterlace the footage as well, but very nicely for SD work. Since I will be creating a film look anyway this isn’t really much of an issue on this project.

I think the interlacing issues may actually be related to artifacting on the HDV or a chroma sampling issue. As when I imported the HDV clips into the FCP SD timeline they render out interlaced but are just not quite natural looking, for lack of a better term.

Thanks for your advice,
Anthony

Anthony Miles
DP, editor
Tim Maloney
June 10, 2005 at 12:43 am

Good to see HDV displaying its broadcast capabilties so early on.

Tim Maloney
Varicam DP
Anthony Miles
June 10, 2005 at 1:01 am

Yes, we will see. Initially it looks very good when de-interlaced and down converted to 8 bit uncompressed SD.

Take care,
Anthony

Anthony Miles
DP, editor

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