HDV exported with animation codec

[David Roth weiss]

Any export option you choose will either give you a letterboxed or widescreen output, there is no “centerpunch” option. To do that you’ll need to cut and paste to a 4×3 SD timeline and resize the image so that the top and bottom of the frame equal the frame height. If there is any squeezing of the image when you first paste it into the SD timeline you need to remove attributes–distort for all the clips.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[John Huff]

David,
Thank you very much, I’ll go to work on that. Do you suggest just using DV-NTSC for my new SD sequence that I’ll be dropping my HD sequence into, or is there something better? The end result will be sent for flash encoding by someone else for website streaming.

Thanks,
John

[David Roth weiss]

John,

If you already have any text or graphics I’d consider cutting or pasting into a DVCPro50 (sometimes labled by Apple as DV50) timeline, as it will better preserve them due to its improved color space and lower compression. Then, you can output to the animation codec, which is lossless and should not create much, if any, of a compression hit on the way out.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Andrew Kimery]

David,

I’m not sitting in front of FCP right now, but I do think you can center punch an export. When you export via QT Conversion under the “size” setting there is a “preserve aspect ratio” drop down menu and I think the options are “letterbox” and “crop” (w/crop being the center punch).

-Andrew

[David Roth weiss]

Didn’t think so, but maybe you’re right? I’m not near FCP either right now to check.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[John Huff]

David and Andrew, Thank you very much for your comments. They are sincerely appreciated.

I experimented exporting the HDV sequence in animation using every possible combination of HD, SD, 16:9, 3:2, 4:3, and letterbox, crop, and sometimes another option “fit to frame if necessary” came up as well and none of them centerpunched or “cropped” off the sides of the 16:9 HDV, leaving 4:3. Every single time, unless I was exporting pure widescreen with no attempt to change to 4:3 (and 4:3 is what I want) the video got horizontally scrunched together (i.e. like changing a landscape-style rectangle to more like a square.)

So I guess the only way, unless I made a mistake or unless anybody out there knows a better way, appears to be like you said David, drop the HD sequence into an SD (and I’ll try DVCpro50) sequence, select the SD timeline and right-click it to select “open in viewer,” then scale it up in the viewer (67% seems to work pretty good) so it fills the 4:3 frame in the canvas. Then export in animation.

Is this what you meant?

Along this line I have one more question for you, if I may. If I took the SD sequence above (using DV-NTSC or DVCpro50) and instead of exporting as animation, I exported to Compressor to create an MPEG-2 file; could I submit that file burned on a DVD to a TV station for cable-TV broadcast? Assuming broadcast quality, my question concerns whether I have taken into account the pixel differences (square, 1.33 etc.) between HDV (shot & edited), SD (exported), and NTSC TV (final goal). Is there an adjustment I would need to make in the workflow to get the pixel size to come out right, similar to the way graphics have to be adjusted for NTSC television?

Again Thank you and Happy Holidays!
Best Regards,
John

[David Roth weiss]

[John Huff] “select the SD timeline and right-click it to select “open in viewer,” then scale it up in the viewer (67% seems to work pretty good) so it fills the 4:3 frame in the canvas. Then export in animation.

Is this what you meant?”

Yep!!!

[John Huff] “If I took the SD sequence above (using DV-NTSC or DVCpro50) and instead of exporting as animation, I exported to Compressor to create an MPEG-2 file; could I submit that file burned on a DVD to a TV station for cable-TV broadcast?”

You would select an MPEG2 transport stream in Compressor, which creates video file with muxed audio as one file. You should not have to change pixel shape or field dominance manually, but do test the results before shipping off as its always possible that Apple may have inadvertantly messed something up when creating the latest version of something.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[John Huff]

David,
Regarding the last question, let me try to phrase it differently. Should the SD video on the DVD that I send, if played on a DVD player, look the same as it will look on TV when finally broadcast? That’s really my question.

That would be the only way I could do a test.

Thanks again, Happy Holidays,
John

[David Roth weiss]

[John Huff] “Should the SD video on the DVD that I send, if played on a DVD player, look the same as it will look on TV when finally broadcast?”

I’m back from vacation now with your answer…

DVD video is too highly compressed for broadcast. Though it will look good on your TV, it is far from “broadcast quality,” and by the time it is compressed again for transmission it would look awful.

You should consider outputting SD to Digi-Beta tape for television broadcast. To do that you should be able to find a facility in your area that can output to tape for you from exported QT file that you can bring to them on a firewire drive. In that case you would export to an 8-bit uncompressed file.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[John Huff]

David,
Thanks so much for your reply, every time you jot down a sentence or two, I learn something.

My previous question was actually asked in regard to pixel size, I was curious if I exported the SD sequence to MPEG-2 video in Compressor for burning to DVD for submission to the broadcast people, whether the video I would see on TV would be scrunched horizontally or vertically due to a difference in square vs. 1.33/1 pixels, similar to what exporting to NTSC video does to graphics like logos and things.

That having been said, I am MOST APPRECIATIVE of the answer you gave concerning image quality because you are exactly right, my image quality has suffered from doing it this way, and I was going to tackle that next.

My problem is that I live on a beautiful lake in rural Georgia, quite a ways from “civilization.” And I had been burning the SD sequence to a DVD because I was having trouble with the Print to Video command to my HV20 HDV mini-DV camcorder. I should be able to fix that.

Let me see if I understand first. (For broadcast at 4:3 on cable TV) Put the HD sequence in an SD sequence as we spoke before, scale it to crop off the sides, then export the SD sequence to an 8-bit uncompressed (Quicktime conversion) file and copy the output to a firewire hard drive, then take the drive to someone who can copy the file to digi-beta tape, then submit that tape to the broadcast people. Is that right? Sounds like it would improve the quality about 5 million per cent!

That sounds like something I could do to get the absolute best quality period, is that where you’re coming from there? But since my geographic location is a factor, what file format and codec could I export the SD sequence to for printing to mini-DV tape, that would give me the best possible quality (for mini-DV tape.) Could that be an acceptable way to go? Would it improve a little/a lot, over the DVD?

(It would make things a lot easier for me, however I haven’t had a chance to look into the associated costs of what you have suggested.)

Again, thanks much for your assistance.
Best Regards,
John