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HDV -> SD DVD
Hello,
Yes I have scanned through as many posts as I could about the whole HDV to SD DVD phenomenon. I think I have a workflow down that is the quickest route. Here’s why:We follow our clients around on their “expeditions” and then quickly edit together their excursion so they can walk away with a 30 min DVD souvenir when their week long cruise is over.
We shoot in HDV and are required to give our Masters, NAT Masters & Best Of’s to our production office in HDV. This requires us to edit in HDV, print to tape in HDV and burn to SD DVD. The final edit and burning process is always down to the wire, this is why we need the quickest workflow. Our ships each have a MacPro with these specs:
MacPro
OS X 10.4.9
2 x 3 GHz Dula Core Intel Xeon
4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 RAM
ATY Radeon X1900
Terrabyte and a 1/2 of INT HDS….Ok, so I tried exporting the 30min HDV piece via Compressor with “Best Quality 90min DVD” and burned it via DVDSP. It looked great but took 3 hours to compress! (not that surprised but unacceptable for our quick turn-arounds…)
I looked through the forums some more and found this method which took only 1 hr 45 min to compress:
Start a new SD FCP Project with these sequence settings:
DV 720×480
Uncompressed 8bitI nest my HDV sequence in the SD sequence (Once on the SD timeline it requires rendering which I don’t do) and then export to compressor. I use compressor’s “Best Quality 90min DVD” Setting.
Once in DVDSP my settings are:
Field Order: Auto
Mode: One Pass
Bit Rate: 8.0 Mbps
Motion Estimate: BestThe final Burn looked great, I didn’t seem to me that anything was squeezed or “ghosting” was occuring, etc.
So my question is: Does this process make sense? Am I missing something? Is there a shorter way?
Thanks in advanced!
-B
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2 Replies
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There is definitly a shorter/better way.
first, encoding at 8 mb is too high, end users will experience problems (also, use 192 ac3 too to lower the datarate). Stick to 6, perhaps 7,
Next, two pass is overkill, so is VBR. It will fit easilly in CBR. No need to lower the datarate on certain places, and you don’t want it to go up for the compatibility.
So, one pass CBR is the better choice, and it will siginficantly increase speed as well.Another option, lay off to HDV tape first, ingest the SD downconvert and encode that (with above parameters). If you start with a SD DV file you should render two times faster than RT.
(no real time saver, as you dump to HDV, 30 mins. ingest 30 mins and render 15 mins, plus all labour, you still have an hour and a half…)As for quality, it’s quite simple. If it looks good to you, it is good for you.
hth
Bouke
http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s -
i forgot…
If you’re in NTSC, ingesting SD as DV is a bad idea. the 4:1:1 DV to 4:2:0 MpegII will make things horrible.
Now i don’t know how HDV is set up, but if you ingest a master in SD you will want a 4:2:2 or a 4:2:0 codec….Bouke
http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s
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