maintaining quality of DVCPro50 material for film out

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

[winnipegboy] “My film-out place in Vancouver seems to think that any rendering of this material will seriously compromise the integrity of the video.”

Please post the name of this “film-out place” so we will all be able to steer clear of them.

[Oliver Peters]

I think a lot of this is going to depend on what you plan to deliver to them and how good your vis efx artists are. Their concern is the multiple passes through the DV50 codec. If you plan to do ANY effects in FCP, such as color-correction, it’s a non-issue, since you already will be going through the codec several times.

Let me offer a workflow suggestion that might change some things for you. If you are planning to uprez in FCP and deliver an HD product for film-out, then this will be a better way. If the film out house is doing the uprez to HD, then they might do a better job, but it is something you really need to investigate. My suggestion is this. Offline at DV50, then uprez when you conform through a Teranex system and take that signal as native HD into a Kona2 as 8 or 10-bit uncompressed. Do all your effects (including boom fixes) in that mode. The vis efx artists should be able to do a seamless paint job in AE if given progessive uncompressed HD frames. Deliver to the film house an HD tape or an uncompressed QT (depending on what they can handle).

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Tony]

If you can’t afford the Teranex another option to uprez on the fly to HD is using the 1200A vtr internal upconverter for the recapture via HDSDI into a Kona 2.

However if drive space is going to be a problem working in HD you may also consider recapturing at standard def 8 bit or 10 bit.

If you do the blowup of any images in FCP do not use FCP 4.5 as FCP 5 has been greatly improved in terms of scaling images.

Tony Salgado

[Oliver Peters]

Although I certainly understand the budget constraints, I would respectfully point out that most upconversions done with VTRs, capture cards and software rendering are simple scaling and little else. I was thinking of rental and not purchase, however, if we are talking about Teranex specifically, I have been doing some comparisons of their new Mini unit, which is in the $3-6K range. The side-by-sides I’ve done are visibly superior on a monitor and night-and-day better if you compare still frames. In normal broadcast it probably isn’t as big of a deal, but for film-out it might be significantly different. Just a thought anyway…

– Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Winnipegboy]

Thanks guys, this is some really helpful info.

I guess I’ll have to find out if the up-rezzing is being done by the film-out guys, and if it’s not, upgrade to FCP 5 (thanks Tony!).

I am now assuming that if I stay in FCP for these effects, then the codec doesn’t change, and all the material can be up-rezzed together – once – at the end of the process.

Thanks again,

winnipegboy