John Dentino
Forum Replies Created
-
Yes, I’ll know in the future to come to this forum and ask questions first. I did what you suggested, comparing the Compressor up-converted files to the Teranex files. The Compressor files look darn good. At first I thought there was no difference. But I quickly noticed that there are small interference patterns (moire? aliasing?) in the people’s hair on the Compressor uprez that are not present in the Teranex uprez. I’ve include two frame grabs below. I think you can tell from them. Another factor is that anything I do in Compressor will be magnified since I have decided to enlarge the frame to provide a wider aspect ratio, a feature that is part of the Teranex option list.
By the way, I kept everything interlaced. It makes sense since it’s DV. We tried progressive up-conversion at the post house, but it left very small squiggly artifacts on the edges of the images. Most film festivals suggest HDCAM as an exhibition format and mention that interlaced is preferred anyway.
Here are the frame grabs:
By the way, the settings for the Compressor up-conversion were the following:
Name: Teranex vs. Compressor
Description: Apple ProRes 422 high quality with audio pass-through. Settings based off the source resolution and frame rate
File Extension: mov
Estimated size: 98.99 GB/hour of source
Audio: multi-track passthrough
Video Encoder
Format: QT
Width: 1920
Height: 1080
Pixel aspect ratio: Square
Crop: None
Padding: None
Frame rate: (100% of source)
Selected: 29.97
Frame Controls On:
Retiming: (Fast) Nearest Frame
Resize Filter: Statistical Prediction
Deinterlace Filter: Fast (Line Averaging)
Adaptive Details: On
Antialias: 0
Detail Level: 0
Field Output: Same as Source
Codec Type: Apple ProRes 422 (HQ)
Multi-pass: Off, frame reorder: Off
Automatic gamma correction
Interlaced (bottom field first)
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 75
Min. Spatial quality: 0
Temporal quality: 0
Min. temporal quality: 0 -
It is lower image quality, but sometimes when you’re doing a doc that requires unobtrusiveness and stealth to get the footage you need, you have no choice. An audience will forgive a drop in quality if the “content” is there. I’d go so far as to say that the average viewer won’t even consciously notice the drop in quality.
-
If you need HD and really want to look like tourists, why not use the Sony HVR-A1U or its consumer brother that really looks like a cheap tourist camera, the HDR-HC3? You can always convert the HDV interlaced footage to 24p later. By the way, the Devil’s Miner trailer is impressive.