[Stephen De vere]

There is quite challenging footage in the film – like small furry things running around in big wides and in big close-ups. I think it may need some special attention in places – things that just the high bit rate (8Mbs CBR) can’t help with entirely.

[Stephen De vere]

Eric,

That’s incredibly useful info to know thanks.

I have shot and cut (I was an asst film editor before cameraman) my doco and mixed the tracks with FCP myself. I seem to have run into trouble when I went to a post house to finish it and then another place for the encoding and authoring. Both 3rd parties produced problems. I may have been just unlucky, but I am now redoing the finishing myself and just have the DVD and encoding to re-do. Perhaps I should upgrade my FCP 4.5 and go all the way myself, using Studio Pro and Compressor.

It’s only Compressor that worries me a bit now. I have to get the best quality without blowing the business model out of the water with costs.

[Stephen De vere]

Thanks for replies. Maybe I am asking the wrong question.

Really I am trying to understand why interlaced SD shot footage looks blocky in places on a 720 LCD but lovely on a Grade 1 CRT, using the same DVD player and connection type, whereas HD progressive (Varicam) originated stuff is good on both.

I just don’t know if paying a lot of money for the encoding of my interlaced SD shot footage is worth it. How do I know if the artefacts I see in the encodes I have had done by a pro are caused by the source or by the encoding method/settings ?

The source looks so much better when I grade it and monitor it on my 21″ Grade 1 CRT via SDI from the FCP timeline. (DVCPro50 shot, 10 bit U/compressed rendering). Just seems so disappointing after so many year’s work that it is such a difficult transfer to make. I even begin to feel it was waste of extra expense to shoot the film DV50 instead of DV25.

I have serious doubts about the competence of the post house that did the encodes so perhaps I just have to try another.

[Stephen De vere]

I remember there’s more to the Bonsai method :

https://www3.telus.net/bonsai/Welcome.html
https://www.produxion.net/2008/04/08/hd-to-sd-conversion-the-holy-grail/

[Stephen De vere]

Peter,

I’m very interested to know if you got the answer to the bitrate settings and more as I’m struggling to produce the same quality DVD for replication in Pal land. I’ve had a DVD authoring house do it but don’t like the encoding quality.

Have you checked the ‘Bonsai method’ for going HDV to DVD ? I shot in SD so I haven’t any experience myself but it looks like the way to go at least in principle. The downconvert scaling is a major way to lose quality.

An authoring house that has Scenarist software may be able to check your authoring for maximum compliancy. I’ve read that most authoring software is a little less thorough in that.

[Stephen De vere]

Do you run the uncompressed playback off single drives on the Firewire800 or two striped ?

[Stephen De vere]

I want go uncompressed because I mustn’t lose any quality. Rendering using a compressed format will result in some loss of quality even if minimal most of the time.

Most shots are single layers and have maybe only one to three filters applied – colour 3-way, sharpen, grad ND – but others, particularly the 4:3 DV sequence, have more – scaling, chroma reconstruction (G-Nicer), sharpen, 3-way colour – so I would expect things to start to significantly deteriorate through all that unless bolstered by the uncompressed codec.

I suppose I am in a position where i do not have the automatic ‘approval’ of a recognised production company, so I may need to have to defend and explain the technical route I took in getting accepted for a broadcast.

[Stephen De vere]

Presumably the SDI version only works for standard def SDI ?
Will there be an HD SDI version ?

[Stephen De vere]

Chris,

Did you ever find a practical cost-effective solution ? I’d be very interested to hear.

I too want to make a low res copy from the camera while reviewing rushes in the field, but it would also be nice to be able to view a small colour non-HD LCD monitor mounted onboard the camera while shooting.

[Stephen De vere]

Never too late, thanks. That looks like a viable alternative, though I worry about the storage required (generally rather high shooting ratios in wildlife productions), but could always go the offline route.

Are you shooting with the camera system frequency at 60Hz ? Does that give “….59.94/60fps source files” over Firewire ?

Did you really notice no difference in quality ? What do you monitor on within FCP ?

Quite a few people in Europe now starting to use 24(23.94) (shoot and edit) instead of 25p for workflow, even when main delivery is for TV. That should simplify things further.

Stephen.