[Daniel Low]

There have been a whole bunch of threads and discussions about this on a bunch of different forums and everybody has their favorites which are:

PhotoJPEG at 100%
PNG
Animation
Blackmagic
Sequencial TGA

Etc

If you have Episode and FCP on the same Mac or network then just export as a reference file (not self-contained).

If I were you I’d just stay in the format that you’ve captured and leave out an intermediate step. The only reason most people move to an intermediate codec is to transfer the content to another machine, usually from a Mac to a PC

Why aren’t you encoding your Flash files at 24fps or 29.97? I’ve looked at the clips on your site and although the picture quality is nice the frame rate is rather choppy.

[Daniel Low]

What a mess.

One thing you’ll have to come to terms with is that if three of the leading encoding applications can’t work with your files, then there is 99% chance that something wrong with them.

I think that your problem lies in whatever is going on when Premiere/Aspect takes the HDV MPEG-2 and wraps it into an AVI. (Why does it fo this – AVI’s are an unknown bastard file format at the best of times)

Don’t rely on WMP to display (or report) anything properly, don’t forget, it wasn’t until XP SP2 that WMP could display even MPEG-1 properly!

I’m guessing that you need to tell cleanerXL that you have an HDV source of 1.33, you encode that to an intermediate high quality WM at 1920×1080 1.00 (1:1) PAR, then re-import that with an input profile of 1.00 (Square) PAR and encode to QT and Real

I’m guessing, as I don’t use either Premiere, Aspect or CleanerXL. You can guess why!

See if you can get better reporting results from VLC, and maybe MPEG Streamclip can help you out of this mess.

MPEG streamclip – https://www.squared5.com/
VLC – https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[Daniel Low]

Jim,

I understand your frustration, but the fact of the matter is that Procoder can and does work well with HDV and has been able to for a long time:

https://www.canopus.com/products/EDIUSPro/speedencoderforHDV_closeup.php

https://www.videoguys.com/procoder.html
“HD and HDV Support
ProCoder 2.0 fully supports HD (720p and 1080i) and can transcode between HD and SD seamlessly. It can also encode HD resolutions and frame rates between formats, including MPEG, DivX, Windows Media 9 and QuickTime. ProCoder 2.0 is fully compliant with HDV MPEG Transport streams captured from HDV cameras and decks.”

Just google for “encoding HDV in Procoder”

What I can’t find anywhere is whether it supports the Cineform intermediate AVI wrapper but it’ appears from your trial that it doesn’t

Anyway, if you can ger cleanerXL to read your files in, and you can encode to Windows Media, then why not create a very high quality intermediate Windows Media file and use that to create the QuickTime & Real files? It’s a long winded workaround, but at least it should work until you get to the bottom on the problems you are having.

[Daniel Low]

Randy,

Like I said it’s not possible – you’ll find a full list of possilbe (legal) frame sizes here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-2

You’ll have an even harder job finding an encoder that’ll support them all.

The methods outlined by Dataton will be FAR easier than finding a way to encode MPEG-2 (or any format for that matter) to 3500×768.

[Daniel Low]

You might find the answer in the support pages of Cineforms website.

Maybe an upgrade to both Prem 2.0 and Aspect HD 4.0 would be wise?

https://www.cineform.com/products/FAQ.htm#Aspect1.

You’ll hate me for saying this, but for a few hundred dollars more you could get a Mac that does what you want, out-of-the-box (and runs your (investment in) Windows apps).

[Daniel Low]

Procoder/carboncoder has no problem with files of that resolution or indeed much higher resolutions. I’d look at the problem being your output from Premiere rather than a problem with Procoder.

Try dropping an unedited/unprocessed-by-premiere-export HDV clip into Procoder and see if it works.

[Daniel Low]

I don’t use cleanerXL anymore and this is one reason I dropped it, it makes too many assumptions and it makes it hard to change default settings as well as it’s reliance on (incorrect) input profile templates.

if you ‘edit’ an input profile by right clicking you have the ability to change the aspect ratio – cleanerxl uses a strange combination of numbers to derive that ratio, maybe they are used as standard somewhere but I’ve never seen them anywhere else, devide one by the other and you’ll get the correct figure.

Cleaner has not been updated usefully in years and this is reflected in its inability to recognise HDV as well as other ‘newer’ formats.

Actually Windows is pretty crap out of the box with any kind of HD source other than WM, there’s no native support for the likes of DVCPO HD or DVCPRO 50 even, despite Microsoft promising this as far back as XP Service pack 2.
Any Mac has this level of capibility out of the box.

I’m not in a position to give you the exact settings with which you should insert into your edited input profile to give you the correct outputs, but maybe Ben Waggoner, (the (ex) worlds greatest compressionist) would like to step in here. Ben was part of the team who created (Movie/Media) cleaner (pro) and then watched it get bastardised by Media 100 and the more so when it was sold to Autodesk, but he now works at Microsoft and is so much more of an expert in these matters than I, especially whe it comes to the psuedo flavors of HD such as HDV.

FWIW: The reaosn I now use OS X for all production work is largely due to the lack of any (direct) support from Microsoft for tools during the production/post production phase of video. Microsoft was, and is, too busy and concerned with the delivery aspect, owning the streaming space is, and was far more important than building a solid architecture for the like of us and that is why Apple have always seemingly always owned with Quicktime technology. Witness the massive migration to FCP which is largely due to issues like these and the fact that Apple OS/Quicktime and 3rd party tools just work. Nearly all of the time, Apple cerainly aint perfect!

That said, I highly rate CarbonCoder (Rhozet) or Procoder (Canopus) for this kind of work. Both are only available on Windows both are roughly the same, at this level.

It’s a London thing.

[Daniel Low]

NTSC Anamorphic
720×486
PAR 1.200

NTSC HDV
1440×1080
PAR 1.33

It’s a London thing.

[Daniel Low]

It’s your input profile, HDV is not NTSC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV#Resolution_and_aspect_ratio

It’s a London thing.

[Daniel Low]

What do you have your Input Profile set to?

Have you double-checked the Quicktime and Real exporter settings?

Do you have a Job Crop applied?

CleanerXL can be confusing at the best of times, not helped by such a badly designed interface.

It’s a London thing.