[Alan Okey]

[Racinghearts] “what about Standard definition how do you compensate for new plasma screens and not screw up your aspect ratio?”

If you’re working with existing 4:3 SD material, you can’t show the whole image on a 16:9 screen without cropping or distorting the frame unless you display the image with black bars on either side.

If you’re creating SD graphics for a 16:9 screen, create them at 854×480 resolution, then resize them to 720×480 and make sure your project settings are set for for 16:9 anamorphic video. If you’re producing a DVD, make sure the footage is encoded as 16:9.

[Alan Okey]

Could you clarify:

Does the 4:3 image need to contain the full content of the 16:9 source, resulting in a vertically stretched image?

Or does the 4:3 image need to maintain the correct proportions by scaling up the 16:9 frame and cropping the left and right sides of the image?

[Alan Okey]

[Dave LaRonde] “If you DO NOT intend to do a film out — or any motion graphics that require the same frame rate as film on TV — you can cut 24p video in a 29.97 timeline.”

-HOWEVER-

If you are delivering on DVD, you can benefit immensely from a 23.98 workflow for several reasons:

First, progressive material is handled much more easily than interlaced material by MPEG-2 compressors, yielding cleaner, smoother results with fewer artifacts.

Second, you can encode your footage with 3:2 pulldown flags so that DVD players will automatically add pulldown on non-progressive outputs, but play the native 23.98 progressive frames on progressive component outputs. This gives the best of both worlds – your material will display as pure progressive on computers and progressive-capable DVD players, and will also look correct on NTSC 29.97 interlaced monitors.

Lastly, this achieves a 20% space savings on the DVD, as only 24 (23.98) frames per second are being stored instead of 30 (29.97). This extra disc space can be advantageous for either increasing the MPEG-2 encoding bitrate for higher quality, or adding more material (extra features, etc.) to the disc.

[Alan Okey]

I believe that Conduit, the new node-based compositing plugin for Final Cut Pro, has a curves node that may function in the way that you need.

https://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=conduit15

Check out the video clips for reference, I seem to recall a section addressing the curves function.

[Alan Okey]

[Graeme Nattress] “Sure, but you can get the same benefits from just doing afinal render to uncompressed at the end, rather than editing uncompressed.”

Very true.

[Graeme Nattress] “Also, you’d better be mastering to a really good pro HD tape format to see the benefit :-)”

HDCAM SR, anyone? ;P

Of course, then the only place you could actually see your pristine content displayed would be on a computer monitor or in a high end post suite… 😉

It’s kind of funny how carried away people can get when talking about pie-in-the-sky formats (HD is great! No, we need 2K! No, we MUST have 4K!) when the average HDTV broadcast looks like crap because of the compression artifacts… People are running out and buying big plasma and LCD screens right and left but there’s no content out there to really take advantage of them yet. Even Blu-Ray and HD-DVD can’t hold a candle to an uncompressed 10-bit HD source. Pity that most people will never get the chance to see one.

[Alan Okey]

[Ian Wilson] “I keep reading that you should get out of HDV workflow as soon as possible and into 8-bit uncompressed or DVCPRO HD. Is this correct? And, if so, what are the advantages?”

While converting HDV to uncompressed HD won’t get rid of any pre-existing compression artifacts in the footage, working in an uncompressed timeline will avoid any further degradation that might be introduced when layering or compositing clips. Also, any color correction, image filtering or added graphic elements (titles, etc.) will not suffer from compression artifacts. If you have the space and the drive speed, go uncompressed.

[Alan Okey]

[Graeme Nattress] “you don’t need the source media to be uncompressed.”

True enough, although you essentially end up with just as much disk space being used, since HDV clips on an uncompressed timeline end up getting rendered anyway.

[Alan Okey]

[drazen] “I couldn’t bare buying an existing XEON only to realize a week later that 8 core beast is launching in a couple of days.”

You might want to read this:

The unofficial eight-core Apple Mac Pro

https://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6663792.html

“Four cores running at 3.0GHz consistently outperform eight cores running at 2.66GHz.”

[Alan Okey]

[Graeme Nattress] “The second question is “why?””

Maybe he wants to use G Nicer?

😉

[Alan Okey]

To help reduce the mosquito noise, you might try adjusting the image contrast to lessen the difference between the brightest and darkest areas. Compression artifacts are exacerbated around areas of sharp detail and high contrast. If you can knock down the contrast slightly, or even apply a very slight gaussian blur to the problem spots in the images, you may help reduce artifacting in the compression process.