Prepare 24p HD video for VHS

[Jeff Pulera]

I don’t know that much about what the Black Magic hardware is capable of, but it has occurred to me that with my MXO2 Mini hardware, that device will downscale via hardware, which would enable me to output the HD timeline as SD and therefore record live directly to the VHS deck out of Premiere, skipping the very lossy DVD compression stage. Perhaps the BMD unit can downscale its output?

Next question, how is the 4:3 VHS footage going to be framed in your HD project? Pillarboxed? Would it work at all to keep the footag widescreen? I know there is no natively widescreen VHS format, but I think if you sent an anamorphic (squeezed) widescreen NTSC signal to VHS, then capture it back and “Interpret as” widescreen in Premiere, it would come out ok, IF you wanted to keep widescreen throughout the process.

Back to your question, why use Compressor if you have Adobe? You could export direct from Premiere or After Effects. I still like Walter’s idea to export as 24p DVD and let the player convert, as the hardware is designed to do a great job at that. But again, have never dealt with that 24p conversion business myself.

Wondering, how did you get to where you have 1440×1080 video, perhaps that introduced the quality issues you are seeing?

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Dustin Parsons]

If the only reason you’re going to VHS is to get the “VHS look” you might want to just check out Red Gian’s VHS plugin: https://www.redgiant.com/store/universe/products/tool/vhs

It would save a lot of time