[Michael Sacci]

[Josh Woll] “but how do feature films come out with a DVD-5 and the quality looks incredible on my HD television?”
They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in production and post.

There is no way anyone is going to match the look of downconverted film to any format.
They have the resolution of film to work with. Every shot is perfectly focused, graded and compressed.

[Josh Woll] “Is there a way I can format my project through compressor or DVD Studio Pro to play the project in it’s true quality on an HD television?
“
How can you expect something to play in its “TRUE” quality while being blown up. Even the hollywood stuff is losing quality.

So the question is how do get BETTER results, understanding you can never match hollywood, without spending their type of money.

1) The camera source, sorry DV is the bottom of the rung, it is a prosumer codec, it gets killed in the grading and compressing process. If you want better results you have to move up.

2) In production, your exposure and focus needs to be spot on, if the shot is soft at all it will never look good enlarged, even if it looks okay in SD. Exposure is also a must, underexposed scenes will get grainy very fast.

3) Final movie has to be graded well. At least with FCP 3-way CC and levels.

4) You have to test your encodes, there is not a lot you can do with Compressor other than bitrate, but messing with gamma and contrast type filters while encoding can help but that all takes time and testing. There is no “Do this, set that” here you have to get in there and test and evaluate. Once again DV is the killer here. BitVice can often give better results from DV source material.

5) 24p would probably be a better frame rate to use, at the same bitrate as 30 you get 20% higher quality.

[Michael Sacci]

[Gerald McLaughlin] “1920x1080i “
These cameras don’t shoot interlaced, everything is progressive. p

[Michael Sacci]

But you don’t have ProRes footage, you are still applying everything to a 4:1:1 clip. Graphics and text will look better. But this is not a magic step to 4:2:2.

[Michael Sacci]

what don’t you understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_color_bars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_time_code

then there was a pretty bad movie named Timecode
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecode_(film)

Anyway you can be more specific.

[Michael Sacci]

[jim branstetter] “The footage is not de-interlaced even though it has no fields. “ it has to be de-interlaced if it has no fields, that is by definition de-interlacing. It may have a pulldown added to get it to 29.97 but that doesn’t mean interlaced. You can try applying a reverse telecine in compressor to see if it can get you a clean 24p.

[jim branstetter] “First my specs for the project are;
864×486
square pixel
24 fps
progressive “

Why are you editing with those settings, you will have to render everything every step of the way. You need to be using a video resolution in FCP, 720×486(or 480) anamorphic.

For the PD footage you would want to change that to 720×480 (not anamorphic) and it will look correct but with black bars on left and right in FCP.

[Michael Sacci]

If you are going to do that much to the DV footage you may want to look at some of the Natress Filters. They have a chroma sampling filter that will help with the step up.

[Michael Sacci]

Why do people ask “am I doing something wrong?” and then not post detailed steps of what they are doing. For specific answers you need to give specifics.

[Michael Sacci]

Export the angle with all the short clips as a self contained movie, if you have sync all the parts to the solid movie it is a pretty quick and easy thing. Use the new movie as your 2nd angle.

[Michael Sacci]

[Christopher Targia] “Journaled HFS+”
Journaling should only be used on the system drive, not on any media drives. There are software that can turn that off without reformatting the drive.

I’m not a big fan of WD MyBook drives, some of them have a few bells and whistles that do auto backups and the like, these can slow things down, some are 5600RPM vs 7200RPM that are recommended for video. Plus the controller bridges in these drives are not the best, drives made by GRaid and OWC use highend bridges.

How full are the drives you are testing, Once you go over the 80% speed suffers, go over 90% and you really take a hit. If a drive has been written to and files deleted you can get a lot of fragmentation and that will affect speed.

You should be getting speeds in the 90s on a single eSata drive.

[Michael Sacci]

Normally this is in the file, happened during recording. This is a digital glitch between the camera and card. Or maybe between the transfer from the card to the HD. You can use P2CMS to look at the card content. If the files are still on the card.