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  • The best way-HD to SD via Compressor

    Posted by Tom Matthies on April 22, 2009 at 12:59 am

    I have a number of spots I’ve edited in HD at 23.98. I need to convert these to SD at 29.97 for transfer to cable outlets via FTP site. The problem is when I export thru Compressor, it’s doing the time conversion by adding extra full frames to the original HD files rather than adding standard pulldown during the conversion resulting in that jerky, annoying motion we’ve all see on the air lately. Is there a way to simply do the time conversion by adding pulldown frames rather than entire frames and smooth out the motion. Usually this looks great outputting thru a Kona3 but I need to do this thru Compressor rather than thru a hardware board since this particular machine doesn’t have a Kona board. Any suggestions?
    Thanks in advance,
    Tom

    Tom Matthies replied 17 years ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Josh Olenslager

    April 22, 2009 at 2:12 am

    Tom,

    If you’re comfortable using compressor, I’d create a custom setting before exporting. I think there’s a function that allows you to select “so source plays at 29.97” which might help with the pulldown issue you’re seeing. I’m not at my editing system now, so I can’t direct you right to it, but there are also deinterlace and field-dominance functions that you can look at. (Options such as fast, best motion, motion compensated, etc.) Might try a custom setting and then see how it looks.

    If you’ve already got an exported quicktime and you’re not averse to experimenting with it, you could also try the conform function in Cinema Tools and see if it can do a frame reordering that helps get rid of the chop. I’ve seen it happen once or twice.

    Josh

    Digital Media, Thought Equity Motion

  • Tom Matthies

    April 22, 2009 at 4:03 am

    Thanks Josh
    I did already go into Compressor and create a custom preset for downconverting from HD to SD while also letterboxing the file. I went into the various controls and set them to generate the best motion interpolation. (or at least I thought) I see the same problem on the air almost everyday with the motion of software downconverted files juddering. It looks like a cable TV channel that’s time compressing a movie a little too much and taking out too many frames for the sake of speeding up the program. This just the opposite problem with adding too many redundant frames in order to fill in the frame rate difference. I’ll try the Cimema Tools approach tomorrow. I’m going to keep at this until I get good results. This is such a common problem that I can’t believe someone hasn’t already been over this ground before.
    Tom

  • Tom Matthies

    April 23, 2009 at 9:36 pm

    Hi Dave.
    Is there a trick in Compressor to get it to add Pull Down frames rather than redundant, duplicated frames to scale to the correct frame rate when going from 23.98 to 29.97?

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