Alexander Kallas
Forum Replies Created
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[billlee] ” It is unclear as to whether Compressor might be detecting the D1 frame size and automatically cropping it to 720 x 480 to make it suitable for DVD, so that you may not be seeing any scaling issues.
“No, we’re talking about NTSC DV here, fixes at 720×480 frame size not 486. Compressor doesn’t know your final
format, just your choice in settings.
For DVD for television, there is no choice in Pixel Aspect Ratio for TV apart from NTSC-CCIR 601/DV
Compressor must be cropping automatically, I see NO scaling degradation.Cheers
Alexander -
[billlee] “NTSC Frame sizes
“Testing: I created an DV NTSC video clip with frames consisting of two fields one of black scan lines and the other of white. This is the worst case scenario, and thus should demonstrate it quite nicely. I imported this into an 8-bit Uncompressed D1 sequence, and it centered the video, down three scan lines from the top. I then exported this video back out as a DV NTSC video clip, and viewed it in the QuickTime Player, ensuring that the High Quality option for video was turned on. There you can see of the deleterious effects of the scaling, especially when compared to the original DV”Hi Bill,
This test demonstrates exactly what we should NOT do, ie re-encoding to the same codec. Why would we ever go back to DV?
In your post you mention that DV artifacts will not show when > un-compressed (they are hidden). I assume we go un-compressed only when COMPLETELY finished (text aside), and then to delivery codec. DV is DV, there is not much we can do about the carried-over DV artifacts, so we are forced to accept them, part of the codec.
Most of my work is for DVD delivery
The whole point of going to uncompressed from DV for me is to avoid the gamma shift that T-L> Compressor creates. The mpeg2 codec uses the field order of the source material, and I have not seen a field order problem with this method.
WRT scaling, Compressor’s presets for say mpeg2 for NTSC rescales to 720×480 size for 4:3 and Automatic size for 16:9, so the frame size of the un-compressed T-L is compensated for.Cheers
Alexander -
[billlee] “At one stage, FCP export directly to Compressor was broken, causing the video and audio encode durations not to match in an MPEG-2 encoding. This was often fatal to their later use in DVDSP. Those of us who discovered it and were affected by it probably swore not to export directly from Compressor again – this habit is likely to be followed by many.”
This problem was detected early in FCP3 and the well-known work around was to export audio to aiff separately, (which is a habit I still have), then on to AC3- No length problems.
Not a good reason to avoid Compressor Video encoding.Cheers
Alexander -
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Paul, amazing,
I’m blown away,
And the quality? Have you had a chance to compare the result with a film-house hardware conversion, Compressor2’s optical flow technology for conversion, and the Natress G converter (I rate them in that order)
This may be best and most economical way for standards conversion.
I’m fascinated!Cheers
Alexander -
[PaulD] “Hi
Sorry to confuse you all so much!
Everything PAL is fine – FCP (PAL setup), TRV-900E PAL for shooting, DSR-20P deck for capture – I’m in the UK.
Deck is PAL only, doesn’t replay NTSC in any form.
So the way I got the NTSC tape digitised with my PAL setup was by using the PAL TRV-900E, but because FCP’s NTSC Easy Setup doesn’t (can’t?) work without a proper NTSC device feeding in the NTSC datastream, I had to use iMovie (which could take the NTSC movie data from a PAL device)….The original post was about the other way round, how to get a PAL DV tape into an NTSC project, using an NTSV TRV-900.
My method will achieve this, if an early version of iMovie is available.
“Hi Paul
Now I’m really missing out.
Before capture you still have to set the format (PAL or NTSC) in iMovie- all/any version, which format did you select?
Are you saying that you can capture NTSC from the PAL camera via the deck? I’ll bet if you can’t do it via fire-wire, there must be a standards conversion happening,
either in the deck or with an FCP render.
After your capture into iMovie, check this raw captured clip NOT in FCP but in the QuickTime Player. What does the raw captured movie clip look like
viz res and frame size, should be 720×480 if it is really NTSC.
Now extract the video only from QT and import into an NTSC FCP sequence,.
Will the video play unrendered, or does it ask for a render (remember, video only, so FCP doesn’t have to split off the audio from iMovie’s DV stream format) and FCP has to do it’s poor quality format conversion.
Please post your result.Cheers
Alexander -
Trash Compressor’s prefs.
Cheers
Alexander -
[PaulD] “Hi
No. Its just a way of capturing DV footage digitally when you haven’t go a proper player of the appropriate standard – the TRV-900 happily passes the digits on the tape down the FW unchanged, so iMovie can capture it, whereupon the Nattress Standard Convertor plug-in can do its stuff 😉
“Paul,
Do you know that the Sony TRV900E (a PAL device) can display an NTSC tape’s content
on it’s LCD?
This can be confusing but here’s the kicker, it will only ONLY display, you cannot capture this NTSC media
from this camera.
The TRV900 is qualified for Fire-Wire capture into FCP, but only in it’s native format.
Why use iMovie?
If you are having F-W capture problems check your camera and media’s format first,
don’t get confused with format conversion.Cheers
Alexander -
[PaulD] “Whilst the TRV900 can output to FW in whichever standard the tape was recorded in it also sends information to the computer down the FW identifying which standard camcorder it is – PAL or NTSC. This causes FCP (and most other NLEs) to fail to capture.
However iMovie v1 and v2 have no such qualms (I haven’t tried it with later versions), but they will need to be initialised with a genuine PAL FW device first to allow the correct standard project to be created – I used a switchable Canopus ADVC device, which in your case would be set to PAL mode. Once you have got iMove ready to capture into a PAL project hotswap the FW cable into the 900, press capture and off you go.
The resultant capture will be in dv stream format, but that will work OK in FCP with an audio render.
“At the risk of sounding sceptical, are you saying that this method will do a standards conversion?
If so, at what quality?Cheers
Alexander -
Is it on a network?
Close that and see if you can find a start-up disc.Cheers
Alexander