Graeme Nattress
Forum Replies Created
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A friend sent me some grabs from HD Torchwood and they were pretty crummy. I sure am hoping that the rest of their output is better. That said, most HD TVs and monitors hide, to an extent, what’s really going on with the picture. Having multiple HD standards that are all somewhat incompatible with one another doesn’t help people get the best, either.
https://www.cinematography.net/Red/comp-matrix.html
has some early tests of the compression. We’re now getting a fair improvement on what you see there. That said, we’re also moving forwards on the camera too!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Jeremy, it’s so sad isn’t it. Everything the director, producer, cameraman, editor does to maximize PQ just goes down the “drain” of broadcast, where very few broadcasters actually care. I’m lucky enough to have grown up in England with the BBC at the height of it’s powers and PQ, and was always terrified at the quality I’d see of broadcast TV in the USA when I was on holiday. Now I’m involved in the whole process and I’m trying as hard as I can to put the very best picture quality I can in to as many hands as I can. I shudder to think what it will look like on so-called “HD” broadcast.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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REDCODE is unbelievably nice 🙂 But it’s quite different and very modern in how it works. It’s a quality-first format that’s designed for camera and editing. And that’s the other issue – working with compression and super-high quality ultra-high definition sources warps you. What was once great quality HD is now “what’s that – it looks like VHS”. I remember when I first taped a programme off the TV onto VHS, and upon playback it looked “perfect”. I couldn’t see the loss in quality we can all now see quite clearly. And then Laserdisc was perfect, and now, to some people, DVD is perfect, and HD is just the bees knees. And now I’m actively involved in ultra-high definition, and that resets your own internal picture quality calibration yet again. It raises the bar of perfection one step further (actually, more than one step further).
So probably not to ask me about HD or SD compression any more, as I’ve moved on to a new level of quality. Best thing to do is to do the workflow test yourself – from source, through edit, to master and viewing, and perhaps make a MPEG2 of it to simulate what broadcast will look like.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Good perspective there Tony.
Video editing is all a series of compromises, and it’s wise to know where the sweet spots and dangers lie. Framerates are a killer. For filmout you need everything 24p in a 24p timeline. This is easy enough if you shoot 24p and make sure it’s all pulldown-free. There’s starting to be real good HDV options for 24p now, but you’ve got to be careful as they only capture on some decks or cameras, and FCP doesn’t yet support (am I right here??) the newest ones.
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Jerry, whenever I’ve edited HDV as HDV it’s been practically as easy as editing DV. Renders take a bit longer due to you rendering 4 times as many pixels, but the HDV codec as Apple implements it is not slow by any means.
Going back to HDV tape sucks a lot, but hey, HDV is NOT a mastering format, so I just bump timeline to uncompressed, re-render and output.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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It might be a consensus, but it doesn’t make it right from a picture quality POV. If you’ve got mixed sources, and want to edit them “all as one” in HD, go uncompressed – no quality loss at all, and you can just not worry about it.
People use DVCproHD as an “intermediate” codec, usualy because it’s fast to decode and is very well supported by FCP, but really, it’s a camera codec, and never was designed for editing, and especially not for intermediate codec work:
1) it’s too compressed. You’ll see artifacts in camera original footage, never mind after a render
2) it’s not full HD resolution, but either 960×720 or 1280×1080, thus complicating things further with pixel aspect ratios, and it reduces the resolution of all footage coming into it , HDV being natively 1440×1080.
3) it’s not the usual delivery format for broadcast, that being HDCAM (hopefully the nicer SR version) or D5. That would mean, in my mind, for best quality that you do your final render of everything in a uncompressed timeline.Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have had a superb intermediate codec for years, called “PhotoJPEG” – but they fail to RT enable it or give it the ful support it deserves. Although it’s compressed, it’s full raster 4:2:2 and mild with it’s artifacts, and fast too. But it’s not a choice as Apple don’t RT enable it. That leaves you with sub-par DVCproHD (best used in situations where that’s what you shot) and Uncompressed, with it’s massive file sizes, and nothing in-between.
I’m not saying you can’t get good looking results with DVCProHD, but I am saying it’s not without it’s obvious flaws. If ease of editing is your primary goal, then DVCproHD on the current FCP platform is about it for HD (due to Apple’s infinite wisdom – even Avid people now have DNxHD), but if picture quality is our ultimate goal, there’s only one answer – uncompressed.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Not really. Problem is both PAL DV and DVD are similarly chroma limited. No way around that.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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4:2:0 Timeline? Is this PAL DV, if so, there’s not much you can do as PAL DV is 4:2:0 as is DVD. In the NTSC world, 4:1:1 from NTSC DV doesn’t translate to 4:2:0 of DVD very well, but if you fix the chroma first, it translates a whole lot better!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Andrew, looks like you’re on the right path now – do tell us how you get on.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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I’m guessing you’re fixing DV chroma artifacts? Then what you’re seeing is correct! That’s because as soon asyou render back to the DV codec, the DV codec undoes all the good work the filter did!
So, what do you do – well, you’ve got to render in an uncompressed or 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 timeline to see the effect and to keep it after render. Basically, DV is 4:1:1 chroma sampling. This means that the full resolution of the chroma is reduced to 1/4 by the codec. Fixing that with the chroma sharpen, you see the effect because FCP renders in 4:4:4, but once it goes back to the DV codec, it throws away all that lovely chroma information, taking you back to the 4:1:1 you started with.
Hope that helps,
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP