XDCAM EX 30P to SD DVD Questions

[Dean Sensui]

The only caveat about editing HD content on an SD sequence is the inability to easily repurpose the program if you want it in HD later. And you’ll have to render the entire program anyway.

Simply re-scaling will result in rough-looking graphics and titles.

For what I do, which requires both HD and SD versions, I let Compressor handle the scaling.

And for any fish caught on the show, I let the fishermen handle the scaling…

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Michael Slowe]

Firstly can I ask Doug how he thinks Compressor compares in quality with BitVice for encoding DVD’s if he’s ever used it. I find it’s terrific.

As to the question of making SD DVD’s but retaining an HD version I edit in an HD timeline and export a QT .Mov and let BitVice do the downscale. That way my HD programme remains intact.

How are people making Blu-Ray DVD’s? That has to be our distribution format in a year’s time surely?

Michael Slowe

[Nicholas Bierzonski]

This link is old but still might be of use to you.

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/ex1_sd_output_young.html

Also when you encode you must decide if you are encoding for an anamorphic 16:9 TV or a 4:3 TV

There is a difference in pixel shape.

Lately we’ve been shooting with the EX1 in full HD 1920×1080

but we’ll compress two different versions for the DVD.

The first will be compressed for an anamorphic 16:9 TV and
the second will be letter boxed for a 4:3 TV

Of course there is no way to guarantee the final DVD player is setup correctly.

But somethings are ultimately out of our control.

-Nicholas Bierzonski
Senior Editor/DVD Author/Java Boy
http://www.finalfocusvideo.com

[Bob O’brien]

Ken Stone’s advice is good, but I do two things differently with excellent results:

1. After editing in an HD timeline with render settings set to Pro Res, when I create my SD timeline, although I do use an anamorphic 720×480 frame size with fields set to NONE, I use an Uncompressed 8bit compressor setting. (Why recompress your footage to the very lossy DV before creating M2V’s for your DVD?).

2. Instead of doing a copy/paste to get the HD timeline into the SD one, I drag my HD sequence from the browser into the timeline. (I don’t know if this makes any difference at all, but I remember reading that recommendation somewhere on the Cow that said this method was better).

Bob

CAMERAS
Sony EX3 & Sony DXC637/PVV3 Betacam-SP

PORTABLE EDITING
*MacBook Pro – 2.33Ghz – 2Gb RAM
*Matrox MXO / 23″ Cinema Display

DESKTOP
*DualG5 2Ghz w/2.5Gb RAM
*UL4D SCSI Card
*HMV800 DualMax RAID0
*AJA IO
*Sony 2800

SOFTWARE
*OSX10.4.11, QT 7.5, FCP 6.0.4, Livetype 2.1.3, Soundtrack Pro 2.0.2, DVDSP4.2.1, Adobe CS3 Prod Suite