[Marni Page]

I’m familiar with that page. It must be a player setting or just bad uprez-ing from the TV side b/c my picture doesn’t quite fit into any of those categories, though the last one is the one I’m shooting for. I checked it again in my laptop and it plays beautifully with no pillars, no letterbox, and no picture distortion, so I just have to trust that my client will see the same thing I;m seeing. Yikes.

[Marni Page]

It looks normal to me. I know if something is really NTSC letterbox and not anamorphic, my mac DVD player would display it with pretty wide pillars — postage-stamped on the screen, right?

Well, that’s not happening on my mac. It looks correctly proportioned.

But like you I thought it might be the player settings so I popped in what I think is another 16:9 indie movie (shot on video and burned to disc) and this movie looked correct on the same TV. It still had bars at the top and bottom, but the CHyron didn’t look wide or anything. But this movie might have been transferred to film before the DVD was made, and the aspect changed — so it’s hard to make an apples to apples comparison.

[Marni Page]

Thanks for clarifying this for me. Much appreciated.

[Marni Page]

Graeme, I just found your article online on the subject of 24p in FCP and found it immensely educational. I obviously have a lot to learn, but this is a great place to start. Thanks.

[Marni Page]

Thanks, Graeme.
If I’m starting with HDV video, and outputting SD DVD, is the advantage of starting with 25p still stand?
I’m really new at this standards conversion stuff. Thanks for your help.

[Marni Page]

Thanks. I’m going to pass this on.

[Marni Page]

This is genius.
Thank you so much.
Marni

[Marni Page]

Hi Dave. I had the same problem with my HV30 and XHA1. I’d love to hear what settings you used in the field to get them close. The problem is that if you use the camera settings to get them close, then you are probably matching the XHA1 (since it is the customizable one) to the HV20 and that could be problematic. Your 1-cmos HV20 doesn’t get the colors as accurately as the 3-ccd XHA1.

Ultimately, I had to do massive color correction in post (on both cameras) in order to get the colors to an acceptably similar level. And for that there’s no particular settings, you just have to work with the color correction tools making small incremental shifts until you get what you want. Then render the video for hours.

The codecs on both cameras are different, making multicam editing even more of a problem. You’d have to re-render your HV20 using the same compression as the XHA1 in order to make it a true multi-cam edit.

Anyway, I feel your pain. It might be best to stick with two of the same cameras if you want to avoid all of the processing later. At least that’s what I plan to do.

Hope this was helpful.

[Marni Page]

Wow, Michael. This is a fantastic tip. One I wish I had ages ago. Thank you so much for this.

Marni

[Marni Page]

Well. We’re a budding international organization, and initially we thought we’d be doing most of our shooting and editing either in India or Nepal, where I’m writing from now. I was thinking the same way you were — if we’re doing most of our work in a PAL world, then I should be working with PAL equipment.

But now it looks like we are setting up offices in the US, where we will have a strong presence and the PAL idea doesn’t seem as genius as I initially thought. So now I’m questioning selling the equipment, or at least upgrading some of our existing equipment to shoot at NTSC frame rates.

Even here in India and Nepal I see a lot of Bollywood DVD’s released in NTSC format, so it made me question my whole process. Indeed most of the TVs and players I see sold on the streets of Kathmandu are multisystem. So I assume if that’s happening here, then it must be the same in other parts of Asia, in Europe and in South America. But I’m just guessing.

So the questions that remain for me are:

1) If we’re heading to the states, then should I stop shooting PAL altogether? Sell what I have and gear up again with NTSC equipment?

2) What is a “multisystem” DVD player? Is it truly multisystem in which each DVD is played in it’s native standard? Or does it have some kind of standards converter in it that will play your movie, but compromise it’s quality?

3) If the DVD players are performing the conversion, what’s going to look prettier — something you converted yourself with Nattress or the DVD player?

UUgghh.