[Tim Gibbons]

Thanks Job,

That’s a good start.

Tim

[Tim Gibbons]

Hey Adam,

I found a great solution to this just yesterday. You’ll need After Effects though but it works better than many, many different solutions I tried – even a hardware convert with a blackmagic card. Check out the thread I created to learn more:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1063466#1063981

Ignore everything I said and pay attention to what Dave LaRonde suggested. I am very, very pleased with the resulting downconvert.

Tim

[Tim Gibbons]

Dave,

Great info. I’ll do another render today with your changes. In terms of FCP defining it as “Field Dominance”, are they still correct in the order? I mean, FCP says that XDCam HD422 footage is Upper Field and you just mentioned that it they were wrong. So is this just an incorrect term or is FCP getting the field order wrong.

Thanks again. Your advice solved a very big problem for me. I’ve been pushing this client off for two weeks now.

Tim

[Tim Gibbons]

Dave,

Thank you. You are absolutely right. I did a test this weekend and sure enough your workflow produces better results than the dead chicken to BetaSP system I started this thread with.

I’m rendering out one of my projects in AE as we speak.

Just to double check, could you take a look at my seetings below and confirm that they are correct? It would be much appreciated:

Render Settings. . . Based on “Best Settings”
Quality: Best
Resolution: Full
Size: 720×480
Proxy Use: Use No Proxies
Effects: Current Settings
Disk Cache: Read Only
Color Depth: Current Settings
Frame Blending On For Checked Layers
Field Render: Upper Field First (Appropriate for my video (XDCam HD422)
Pulldown: Off
Motion Blur: On For Checked Layers
Use Open GL: Off
Solos: Current Settings

Output Module . . . . Based on “Losseless”
Format: QuickTime Movie
Output Info: PNG — Spatial Quality = 100(Most)
Include: Source XMP MetaData
Output Audio: 48.000 khz/16 bit/Mono
Channels: RGB+Alpha
Depth: Millions of Colors+
Color: Premultiplied
Final Size: 720×480

Thanks again Dave.

Tim

[Tim Gibbons]

Rafael,

That’s really interesting that you live in Laos. I was there in 2001 shooting a travel doc and speaking of BetaSp I was shooting on a BVW-D600. Due to the humidity, I was seeing this weird vertical oscillation in the picture when I played back video through the camera. After a few days my, concern grew to the point that I just had to find a place to check the video out on a real deck. I think we were in Vang Vieng. So I tell our driver, Sai, that we need to find a place to view the video and he takes me to this concrete compound with military guards armed with AKs at the gate. they instruct me to walk in and the driver has to stay outside with the van. I walk in, not speaking a word of Lao and they bring me to a guy that looks and acts just like an engineer but doesn’t speak English. I pantomime to the best of my ability, show him the Beta tape and he looks really worried. I start following him down the hall of this concrete bunker. All I can think is that this is reminiscent of “A Year of Living Dangerously”. We turn a corner and there’s a door with all these shoes lined up at it’s base. The engineer gestures that I should take off my shoes and after I do he leads me in. BAM! It seemed like I was in the jungle walking through an abandoned military installation and then I walk through that door into a first-rate television station control room. I walk to a wall of video monitors and tape decks and there is a PVW-2800 BetaSP record deck. I gesture that I want to put the tape in and the engineer nods. The video starts to play back and the visual problems I had viewing through the camera were gone . . . . but now there’s a very hard horizontal black line running through everything and the audio is running perceptibly slooooow. . . .

The engineer is looking at me like I just ruined his day by bringing those guards to him and I’m staring at my video wondering what the hell is wrong and then it dawns on me that this is PAL country! Sure enough, I look at the deck again it I notice that it’s a PVW-2800″P”. So I chalk the visual issues up to the NTSC/PAL issue and get out of there.

Laos had to be one of my most memorable international gigs that I ever had. The people there were so kind and at least back in 2001, we were an oddity as tourism wasn’t a big industry back then. People were genuinely interested in us and they didn’t have any problem at all that we were Americans. In fact they seemed genuinely pleased that we were from The States. . . . . considering the bombing the US did back in the late 60s and the early 70s.

We used to joke that we were a multi-million Kip production! We used to carry two backpacks filled with Laotian currency.

Rafael, you are truly lucky to live in that country. I’d go back in a heart beat. Please check out my website http://www.TimGibbons.com, I have some video on there and a few of the shots on “Profiles” are from your country.

Are they still making “Lao Beer”?

Warm regards.

Tim

[Tim Gibbons]

Yeah Scott,

I tried quite a few permutations. The “Best” setting was pretty much my standard. I’m running the most current version of FCS and I tried exporting as a self-contained ProsRes 422, as well as trying the native codec to see if that made a difference. I probably tried 12-14 different variations to improve the look without much success. I even bought Cinema Craft Encoder MP for $800 and it still looks like crappola. Maybe it has something to do with the XDCam HD422 codec. . . . or maybe it is due to my Blackmagic card. . . I’m not sure what it is but the text on the encodes I did through FCP and Compressor looked like video game title screens from the 80s. Any curved letter or number is stair-stepped. Throwing it up on a Samsung 36″ HDTV played through a PS3 made me cringe. It’s been a frustrating process.

Tim

[Tim Gibbons]

Very Funny Dave,

I would have been tempted to take offense if you hadn’t followed that up with some interesting advice. I’ll try the conversion in AE over the weekend and tell you how it goes.

In regards to waiving a dead chicken, that’s a no-go. My wife is a vegan.

😉

[Tim Gibbons]

Thanks Chris,

I’ll try the anamorphic. Unfortunately I don’t own an analog SDI deck so I’m stuck going component in and out of the Beta Deck.

Tim

[Tim Gibbons]

Scott,

It seems to me it’s much more fundamental than just adding a blur filter to the mix. It’s not just about the aliasing and the moire. The whole image looks better doing the hardware down convert. Check out the thread I mentioned:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1058806

The thread does a good job of describing how some very knowldgeale people are frustrated by FCP and Compressor’s inability to do a good down convert. . . .

Tim

[Tim Gibbons]

. . . . and I hope somebody at Sony hears about customers like you Steve. As physical media formats go away and file based video becomes the norm, the brand and model of your camera will become less and less important. NLEs will be able to handle everything and card readers will become very, very cheap.

At some point adequate “resolution” will be a matter of course. 35mm became the norm for film. I have no doubt that in the near future, the same will happen for video. A common ground on imager resolution will be figured out. My guess is for the majority of TV production 1080p will become the standard . . . I mean why the heck do you need 4k resolution for a 1080i deliverable? It would be like shooting Imax for a sitcom. Talk about overkill. . . . and there’s no chance in hell that the FCC is going to mandate another TV standard any time soon. . . Like it or not, 1080i or 1080p is going to be the standard for decades.

Tim