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What’s the best choice for my situation? HD vs SD –DVD vs Blu-Ray
I’m doing some work with an independent filmmaker who just completed a feature length documentary and he’s starting to show it in theaters and festivals. Due to extensive use of Standard Def archive TV footage – the film was posted in 4:3 standard def.
Now, theaters that want to show the film say they’ll support playback from either DVD or Blu-Ray.
Given compression and bitrate and stuff like that, what’s the best option?
1. Give them a good old-fashioned DVD
2. Take the SD movie and blow it up (in Final Cut) to a 1280×720 Sequence and create a Blu-Ray from there, leaving black bars on the left and right to preserve the 4:3
3. (this is something he mentioned and I thought I would ask) Take the SD film, drop it into a 1280×720 sequence but don’t blow it up. Effectively giving you the screen size of the SD DVD but with the added bit-rate of Blu-Ray. The blu-ray would have black all around the image but let the projectionist deal with that.
I have all the toys at my disposal. FinalCut 7, Compressor, Toast, Production Premium 5.5 and a blu-ray burner.
Thanks so much!
Andrew Wilson
WestView Digital Video & Design
https://www.westviewdigital.comAndrew Wilson
WestView Digital Video & Design
http://www.westviewdigital.com -
3 Replies
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Theres a thread a couple down which deals with the same issue. Your stuff is SD…there’s nothing to change that. Blowing it up and it will still be SD – just on a bigger canvas.
A GOOD encode at DVD bitrates vs. up rezzed SD at BD bitrates will look the same. Dont know how to correctly up-rez SD footage? Thing will look worse.
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Thanks for pointing out that thread – I didn’t pick up on it. It’s about the same predicament we’re in.
What’s the best way to uprez if and when we go that direction?
Thanks!
Andrew Wilson
WestView Digital Video & Design
http://www.westviewdigital.com -
Andrew,
there are a few technical things you might think about in your discussion aobut SD and HD:– upscaling SD to HD will take some time, if you would like to do it with good scaling-tools
– encoding HD-material will take much! longer than SD-materialbut there are a few advantages as well:
– you can create a popup-menu on upscaled material on your BD
– you´ve got better control of the upscaling-quality, the upscaler in tv-monitors are not very goodso I would advice to upscale anyway.
cheers
danny
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