P2 Footage looks a bit soft – ideas?

[Martin Phillips]

Well, I’ve been conducting some quite exhaustive (and exhausting) testing of this issue. I have been using some other HD footage not from the HVX 200. It is HD footage straight from Panasonic.

Instead of the pin-sharp image that I was expecting, again it was rather soft on the downconvert.

Anyway, I eventually phoned BM support to be told that ‘this is what you would expect doing a down-conversion and this is as good as it gets’. Also, I was told that the (SD) SDI would not be much better.

So, all in all I am very disappointed with the card. I wanted the dual facility of playout to HD and SD, but it seems that the SD downconversion facility will not give the picture quality needed.

Thanks for the advice and suggestions so far – any more very welcome!

Martin

[Tony Partam]

Had the same issue when i first got the Decklink.

I even downconverted the HD material in AfterEffects and recorded the file on DigiBeta and also recorded straight from HD Downconversion to DigiBeta.
I then re-captured to uncompressed….put the two files on the timeline and was amazed at how much the realtime downconversion does flicker removal and thus loose too much details.

I also checked with BMD support an been told that i cannot compare realtime downconversion with a software that has all the time to render.

I guess it’s done by hardware and cannot be fixed by a software driver update.