CineForm Export To DVD at 24P.
 

Okay so I downloaded the trial version for CineForm Aspect HD and so far I'm in love with the intermediate codec. It's very smooth in Premiere Pro and I wasn't expecting it to be. My preview videos used to be so jittery before and looked terrible and it's gorgeous with CineForm.

But my head is still spinning over DVD export.

When I used to edit 60i natively in Premiere Pro, export to DVD was very simple and I found the quality of the results pretty good. Now I'm coming from an intermediate codec and it's rather confusing. Furthermore I also want to make an anamorphic 24P dvd.

I followed the steps on "Export To DVD" from CineForm's website, however it tells me to interlace my footage and to put "lower fields first", however my footage is progressive because I'm coming from a HVR-V1U camcorder. I realize there's no direct export to DVD from CineForm's 24P timeline in Premiere Pro (which, I'll be honest would be quite pleasant). But rendering out to DV AVI, and then going into something like Canopus ProCoder to make an MPEG-2 file that's compatible to DVD, and THEN going into an authoring program all seems a bit tedious.

Not to mention making sure all the frame rate and interlaced settings stay correct at 24P.

I'm gearing up to burn to DVD with my ProCoder 2 Mpeg export. [I selected 23.976p -> NTSC (3-2 Pulldown) in the settings]

We'll see how it turns out.

Is anyone doing this more efficiently?

These is likely some confusion that DVDs are always interlaced, 24p is 60i with pulldown. Plus those old instruction are focused on 60i DVD exports (before we had HDV 24p sources.) For you 24p sources, I would simply do a CineForm export to a 720x480 16:9 24p AVI, then load that into Encore or your DVD burning tool of choice; a single step, not hard. Also why to you assume we disable the direct DVD export from Premiere, that works too, it just seems that most people perfer the quality outside of Premiere.

Sorry, I posted this too quickly I suppose. I assumed the glitches I was experiencing were due to the CineForm Codec, but it's obviously to me now that it's not the case.

One thing I wanted to confirm with you though, content can be stored on DVD in progressive, can it not? I understood that the DVD player would send out 24P and the 3:2 pulldown would be added by the TV once the signal is received.

That's the only reason why I was nervous about changing field orders, to interlaced, etc... I wanted to store it on disc as progressive.

I was confused mostly by Canopus ProCoder's settings. There's 23.976p and then there's one that's 23.976p -> NTSC (3-2 Pulldown Added).

I'm still a little unclear which one to check off if my CineForm files are 24P AVIs but I guess that's for me to head over to the Canopus forums for. :)

The confusion comes from the DVD standard which has no progressive mode, it is only encoding fields with repeat flags that a progressive DVD player uses to reconstruct the source 24p signal from the 60i data on disk. More confused? That is why I recommend a 24p AVI export and let the DVD burning software work it out -- i.e. if you have 24p (23.976p) source there shouldn't be any choices other than 4:3 or 16:9.

Well I'll say one thing, aside from CineForm's outstanding program/plugin/codec...the support for all things related to CineForm is superb as well.

Thanks David.