[Mike Smith]

Hi David

That troubles me a little too.

It feels “tidier” (if maybe a little anal-retentive?) to try to keep all the material consistent on a single format. I have my widescreen on auto mostly, and it’s not nice when it keeps jumping
around – though there are worse things in life!

Our BBC here in the UK has a policy of filming in widescreen (16:9 of course), then converting everything to 14:9 for broadcast, so that the image is just a little squeezed for 4:3 / standard viewers (still the vast majority here i understand) and a little stretched for widescreen viewers.

I was wondering about a similar approach for this one … ???

Mike

[Mike Smith]

This sereis of pages might be worth a look …
https://www.postmagazine.com/post/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=109319&&pageID=1

[Mike Smith]

Hi Eyal. Didn’t mean to be so pompous and “educational” – apologies.

If you have good-looking Quicktime DV files you should be in good shape.

If not, I guess you need another post house that can do a better job on your source – if there’s a lot of noise in the Quicktime files, you may need to have the stuff re-encoded. You could try playing with Premiere filters, but whether it will look great to you / your clients in the end – and give a good representation of your cinematography … well maybe.

If they haven’t “graded” the material from the different shoots to make sure it all has the look you want, but it looks reasonably clean, you could try out PPro’s colour correction.

If you have good DV and are not impressed with the output from Compressor (I know you wouldn’t be alone), in the Windows world you could look at re-encoding yourself and playing with the encoder settings.

With a very short piece, you should be able to set a high data rate and get a good result from PPro, so long as you avoid field order problems. If you take time to experiment, I think you’ll end up with a good result.

If you wanted to go better than MainConcept, the PPro encoder, opinions vary but there’s a basic Cinema Craft software encoder / PPro plugin available for around $60, with a free trial version, which many people rate highly, and for around $500 – $600 there’s Canopus Procoder 2 which some people on here recommend. CinemaCraft also has a “top end” version at $2,000 … seems like a lot to me.

Given that you’re encoding a short piece, though, you should be able to get a good result direct from PPro ….

Good luck.

[Mike Smith]

PPro plays back 10-bit uncompressed fine if the disc speeds are fast enough (around 26MB/s for playback single stream, standard definition, capture or playback) These isk speeds are demanding, even for standard definition ; you’d probably need a fast SATA array dedicated to the video capture to make it work. It’s a commmitment. Decklink on Windows with PPRo will play back unrendered, and will do real-time dissolves (on a fast system able to meet two playback streams each at 26MBs …)

You’d also really need a way to view the output on a video monitor. You could find a way with a fast system graphics card to support an additional video monitor, but I think many people opt for additional specialist hardware to convert digits to viewable video out. Non-DV video won’t work through a miniDV recorder (or camcorder).

A card like Decklink can be fairly cheap – (Decklink SP has component in and out, and prices at not too high – around $600 USD – a bit more for the Extreme with SDI in as well) As Marisu points out there are also break-out boxes (by the likes of Canopus, Convergent and others) which handle various video, audio and machine control in and out through a firewire connector – which saves you opening the system box if you don’t like that, don’t have a decent spec machine or have no spare slots. Some will convert all to DV; some will pass various video formats through the firewire connector.

How much better is uncompressed? That’s arguable. For graphics, uncompressed can look a lot better than DV.

For filmed material, great Beta SP, carefully lit and photographed on a late-version broadcast camera with a broadcast lens, can be really excellent – if your viewer sees it on a good screen.

If you’re going to distribute via DVD, Beta SP will still look better technically than Mini DV (as long as your encoding is OK) But fast, new-style filming on cheap UVW100 Beta SP camcorders done by amateurs won’t look that great …

It depends a lot who your customers are, and how they will see the material, and whether you can afford or justify the more expensive (non-DV) route in terms of additional sales to broadcasters.

If you’re selling to broadcasters then you’ll probably be thinking DigiBeta, and, real soon now, High Definition. For corporate, DVCAM / DVCPRO (and maybe HDV?) offer very good performance for the price, for viewing on DVD or lower-quality distribution media …. so where’s your audience / market along with can you afford it could be key questions.

Unless you’re committed to a high-end broadcast market place and have the finances to go uncompressed, why not look for a box to convert your component to DV / firewire and save the money ..?

[Mike Smith]

I guess for Beta SP you need a capture card with component in – something like a BlackMagic Decklink with the component in connectors, or there are various other options for Windows and Mac.

Uncompressed 10-bit is great if you can afford the disc space and speed. Some very-high-quality older capture boards will compress 3 or 4 to one virtually transparently – less disc space, but you may need more expensive SCSI discs. (I was recently offered an entire such edit kit, using Perception Realtime board, in a twin Pentium running Windows 2000 (500 MHz as I recall) system for

[Mike Smith]

I can report from direct personal experience successful playback of a range of Encore-authored dvd discs using Intervideo’s WinDVD – even discs with high data rates, playing on an ageing and slowish computer runnning WinME. So I don’t think there’s an underlying compatibility issue.

I guess you’ve likely lost that client already, though.

No doubt you’ve tested your disc on a standalone player or two, and had other users view it on computer without difficulty ..?

If you were trying to troubleshoot the client’s computer, I guess you’d want to test (a range of) discs on it, commercial and DVD-R using different disc speeds (x4, x8, x16?) as well as video compressed at different data rates .. if everything (anything) else plays, there would be more reason to suspect a problem with your disc …

[Mike Smith]

Thanks Oscar. The Main Concept update seems to have fixed the issue. It felt slightly odd that I’d used the dvd-direct-from-ppro feature successfully a couple of times before – albeit on very short programme segments, all cut from very short captured clips. Wasn’t expecting this one.

[Mike Smith]

It’s good that storage costs are falling, but a light or variable compression option would still be a great plus.

One approach might be near-invisible 2:1, 3:1 or 4:1, supported by an “offline” rating (6:1 ? 12:1?)that would play from the same timeline. Or capture to / playback from DV avi format would be useful.

However much disc capacities expand and costs fall, there never ever seems to be enough storage or enough speed; it would be a shame not to push on and try to solve this. Are there 3rd party mjpeg / mpeg4 / other codecs that could help?

Hope you manage to find a way to do this!

Thanks

[Mike Smith]

Hi David,

That would be a fairly short book, I hope! I’m on Windows, mostly, producing corporate pr and training mostly, with a small line in publishing specialised training materials (formerly on vhs, now on dvd, and I provide services for the occasional independent short film.

I produce on a mix of digibeta, beta sp and dvcam according to project. I’ve been using digigame’s megapeg encoder for a while (a few years back, with settings suitably tweaked, it seemed to me to allow for a much better encode than Cleaner), and am wondering how much things might have moved on.

I saw a terrific encode for Fuji on a dvd flyer promoting their new film stocks … and wondered how it was done, apart from originating on de luxe film stock: the comparable kodak demo looks less impressive, and I suspect that those results wouldn’t necessarily be mirrored if we were to view the projected film.

So I’m hoping to get input on how to do better …. apart from Procoder, which has a lot of good recommendations, people have mentioned Bitvice to me. TMPEG / Tsunami seems to get very mixed reviews – some outstanding. It looks like Ligos are moving out of the field. Cinema Craft – haven’t seen the output, but $2000 seems out of my immediate range … don’t know how good their basic version might be ?

Thought this forum might have some expert input – I’d love to get the very best results I can afford (probably most people would)!

So I’m up for learning from a small book’s worth of info and opinions – how to get great results, reliably and without breaking the bank … speed doesn’t hurt either, though it’s not the first consideration for me at the moment.

All best

Mike