[Linwood Ferguson]

I get the advice generally, but I am using this for home videos not more serious work. I do a lot of still photography so I appreciate the depth of the color correction capabilities of Resolve, and the edit capabilities are good enough for me. The audio… well, is more of a challenge. I wonder how much they will improve in 12?

I’m a bit unclear how one even approaches this, though, with a real tool. I looked at the Avid Pro Tools First, and it looked quick capable, but if I can ask a naive question – isn’t it a challenge to merge in, say, background music when you can’t see the video on a timeline? Or do the non-free versions show you the video simultaneously?

Or do you do all the timing – putting clips together and synchronize things — in the editor, then clean the audio up but not change the timing in a downstream editor?

Sorry if all this is obvious to people doing it for a living, this is more of a lark for me, to clean up our old video from the 80’s and 90’s.

Linwood

[Linwood Ferguson]

Hopefully my post wasn’t inappropriate in some way, if so I apologize and please help me know why.

But in case someone else is helped with this, here is what I ended up doing.

First, nothing I tried in Resolve’s deliver function produced a file with 4:3 DAR even when it was set for it. Whether that’s my error or a “feature” I do not know.

So what I did was maintain a 704×480 resolution throughout (explicitly, not choosing NTSC), used square pixels inside of Resolve, and did a change after output.

1) From DVD: Used MakeMKV to copy the DVD to disk as MKV file and consolidate the individual containers.

2) Used FFMPEG to convert from MKV to Prores so I had a more edit friendly format in the same size, and also de-interlace (experiments each way showed this to be better). Example command:

ffmpeg -i "u:\Videos\Hawaii_1988\title00.mkv" -vf yadif -codec:v prores_ks -profile:v 2 -qscale:v 11 -c:a pcm_s24le "u:\VideosToResolve\Hawaii_1988.mov"


3) Used the above for input to a Resolve, in a project with timeline explicitly set to 704×480 square, 29.97 frame rate (matching the original).

4) Edited, color corrected, etc.

5) Rendered from Resolve as an uncompressed intermediary file. I chose more or less at random (advice welcomed) Quicktime, Uncompressed UYV 422 8 bit, 704×480, 29.97 with audio.

6) Converted to a more web/PC criendly MP4 format with FFMPEG as follows:

ffmpeg -i "u:\VideosFromResolve\Hawaii Test Output.mov" -c:v libx264 -preset veryslow -crf 18 -maxrate 1500k -bufsize 1835k -refs 3 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "setsar=10/11" -c:a libvo_aacenc "u:\VideosOut\Hawaii Test Output.mp4"


The result is, as expected, pretty sensitive to the maxrate parameter; I found I could not see a difference at 1.5mbs vs the original input of about 4.3mbs and saved a lot of space (these old sVHS were really messy).

The other thing I had was about 8 pixels of tracking error noise at the bottom. I’ve experimented with both blanking it out, and also zooming to shift it off screen at the bottom (avoiding a black bar at the bottom). I’m not sure which is better — the slight zoom scale is probably distorting slightly, the bar is a nusiance.

The result of this is a MP4 that expects a 10:11 pixel width which all the players seem to respect (though some scale horizontally some vertically, interestingly).

I still don’t know if I would have been better to scale this on input into square pixels so that on output I actually write 704×528 pixels square. That seemed to work, but again not sure if the scaling is better done there or let the player do it.

Advice welcomed, I don’t know if I’m creating something needlessly complex or not. But it works.

Linwood