Question on quality ….

[Jon Barrie]

I think the biggest problem being seen here is that the material from hollywood is never DV. It is uncompressed. DV does bad things to colour and pixel aspect ratio.
Try exporting your AE comp to Uncompressed and play that in fullscreen if your system can keep up (which it may not without expensive hardware).
I would say that a direct MPEG-2 from the Uncompressed media would look better than DV as they use different colour space, MPEG is better as holding colour (4:2:2) Vs DV which is (4:2:0)

– JB

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net

[Mark Hollis]

Vince has a really good point here — you are doing a software conversion. But one thing I believe you are doing is double-compressing the material.

If you have material that is in a compressed state (and that is what you are editing with) and you then use another codec to compress the final result, you’re double-compressing and video really hates that.

Vince’s point is that most facilities use a Teranex to do conversion. A VC300IC will run you around $40,000. And it’s worth every penny, because you can convert NTSC up to HD, using several methods of stretch or reverse-letterboxing, you can convert between HD standards (like from an American standard to an European one or between American standards) and so on. If you are a facility that does broadcast editing or you are a broadcaster, the cost of a Teranex is incidental to the cost of doing business.

All of your exports should be as simple as possible, and completely uncompressed. Then once you have uncompressed media on your computer, use a high-quality transcoder, like Sorensen Squeeze to reduce the bitrate down to something that is manageable.

And by manageable, that means the material can be played back using a normal computer off of a single hard drive (not an array).

I tend to use a tool from Steelbytes called HD_Speed to test drives. Arrays need to crank out significant speed 400 Mb/sec is a good speed for an array (with disks running at 10K RPM) but a solo (SATA) hard drive that you have in your computer may have a burst speed of 150Mb/sec. The problem with video is that, unless you have created a file that has no fragmentation, the video and audio information may require that your hard drive work hard to seek the next bit of the file while you are playing it. Most hard disks these days have RAM caches that allow the drive to read forward and store a bit of information so that the head actuator can get the next bit of video without dropping frames. This also keeps audio and video in sync as well.

The bit rate can be higher for hard drive playback than for DVD playback, as DVD drives run a lot slower than hard drives. The advantage with DVDs is that the information is stored in a manner that makes sequential access easy, because that is the way most DVD files are read, sequentially and not randomly.

A good bitrate for DVD burning is 7Mb/second. Blu-Ray is 30Mb/second. A hard drive can sustain those rates during playback with ease — even for a fragmented file.

So when you are setting up to output your final project, you need to be sure you compress once, and once only. Comnpress to a bitrate that may be played back easily by any computer — and that includes playback from a DVD or from a Blu-ray disk. Use the highest-quality settings to get the optimal bitrate you can with your material.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Stanley Flomin]

wow thanks for the really detailed answer. That was very informative! I will certainly look into the hardware you mentioned. I work in a small and new production studio and although I’m fairly new here I can tell that they are doing some really strange things that should be fixed. But I didn’t want to present anything to them until I understood the issue inside out.

I DID feel like we were doing double compression but I wasn’t 100% sure on that because when they output from premiere they do it in fully uncompressed qt files (using either the ‘none’ or ‘animation’ codec, leaving the quality at the highest setting). They later compress their files to H264 as final output to their clients. Is that considered double compression….I wasn’t sure since the first ‘compression’ didn’t really seem like compressing anything.

Thanks again Mark, and everyone else!

[Mark Hollis]

…when they output from premiere they do it in fully uncompressed qt files (using either the ‘none’ or ‘animation’ codec, leaving the quality at the highest setting).

Remember, the video they are working with may be compressed, even though their output may be uncompressed.

And the “animation” codec is not so much a codec as it is color space. I believe Premiere Pro works in standard Video color space, unless you specify different. Animation gives you the range from 0-255 in RGB space, while video gives you 16-235, I believe. Then there are gamma curves that are typically applied to make video and/or graphics line up to desired specifications, with 709, logSRGB and linear gamma.

“None” applies no curves or color space limitations that are not all ready inherent in the material as captured. It will also create a pretty large file size and, frequently, you won’t be able to play back the file on a standard computer without it being on a disk array.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Stanley Flomin]

ah I didn’t know that about the animation and ‘none’, thanks.
I tried rendering out as the codec that it was filmed at (dv ntsc) and rendered out 2 qt files from the same clip. One was set to the original codec dv ntsc, and the other as animation. Even though the dv ntsc clip uses the same exact codec that it was filmed and the quality seemed like it was the same to me, the only difference was that it looked like the dv ntsc codec washed the colors out a slight bit, making things brighter.

Do you think thats just an adobe media encoder issue? How could the animation codec rendered it out to look exactly like it did in my premiere sequence, I was hoping the dv ntsc codec would do so as well 🙁

anim codec :

dv ntsc(footage was in dv ntsc)

[Mark Hollis]

She’s very nice. Does she date videographiers? (not serious)

Your animation codec looks a little more “contrasty” and if you looked at it in a scope, you might see the blacks at zero IRE and the whites kissing 110.

Of course, for video, that may be more range than you particularly want, so the “none” “codec” would be right.

She’s “washed out” in the DV-NTSC codec because DV means 4:1:1 (YUV) compression. DV is “good” compression because the color is compressed and, because we have more rods than cones in our eyes, we don’t percieve the compression very well. This is why S-VHS looks so much better than VHS because, despite the fact that it is “color under,” the black and white portion of the signal is as really high resolution.

But the signal is still compressed. And, so if you compress that further, you are double-compressing video. And that’s bad.

Use “none.” Then use a high-quality compression program like Sorenson to compress “gently” to get the desired bit rate.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Stanley Flomin]

hah I can’t say I know anything about her, that was her first time here 🙂
I don’t usually have much to do with the actors, just edit the videos.

I totally hear you on the animation one being contrasty, it was actually like that to make up for what rendering it out as dv ntsc, then it’d look normal. The final output is only watched on another computer monitor so I don’t need to worry about what it will look like on a tv. But at least now I understand why dv looked ‘washed out’.

I will definitely give sorenson a shot, I know others have spoken highly of it as well.

Many thanks for all your help Mark, and of course everyone else.