Best Render Settings for Big Screen?

[Zachary Mattson]

Hi all,

I'm shooting a short film that will be submitted to several film festivals. I'm shooting primarily on Canon 7D, but will need to render out HD and SD that will be placed on DVD and Blu-Ray to meet the different film festival capabilities. I'm wondering what you guys find to be the best render settings for big screen projection in both HD and SD. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Zach

[Perrone Ford]

Highest quality allowed by the festival. I just had to do this in December for our short. Some was going to DVD, some to BluRay, and we had one DigiBeta submission! Totally unbelievable in this day and time.

[Zachary Mattson]

Thanks Perrone, do you use MPEG-2 for both HD and SD? I have a really good setting that I found and modified in WMV format for SD, but I have only seen it up to 46" (looked really good on that size tv), so I don't know if it would look good for projection. OR, would you suggest writing it out to MP4 and then putting it in MPEG StreamClip and writing it out to the "Perrone Ford DNxHD MOV" setting, and on to BluRay/DVD from there??

For some reason on the samples that I have written to HD Mpeg-2, it has looked worse on my monitor than the MP4 and WMV settings, but I don't know how that would change on projection...

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Zachary Mattson

Thanks Perrone, do you use MPEG-2 for both HD and SD? I have a really good setting that I found and modified in WMV format for SD, but I have only seen it up to 46" (looked really good on that size tv), so I don't know if it would look good for projection. OR, would you suggest writing it out to MP4 and then putting it in MPEG StreamClip and writing it out to the "Perrone Ford DNxHD MOV" setting, and on to BluRay/DVD from there??

For some reason on the samples that I have written to HD Mpeg-2, it has looked worse on my monitor than the MP4 and WMV settings, but I don't know how that would change on projection...

The trick here is minimizing loss. And EVERY conversion you do that is not lossless makes things worse. In the end, I actually ended up working lossless as much as I could, and then going to DVD with as high a bitrate as I could squeeze onto the DVD.

I tried to use Mpeg4 for the BluRay, but the Sony DVDA program choked every time. Eventually, I did a lossless render from Vegas, and just let the DVDA program compress it. Every Mpeg4 attempt over 12 Mbps failed, so I eventually did it in Mpeg2. I was able to screen it on a 40ft screen and it looked nice. So that's what is out for the festivals.

[Zachary Mattson]

Sounds great, I will give that a try...just to clarify, you went with MPEG-2 at 25mbps, or just kept it at 12? I have another question, not really related, but I assume you bring the sharpness all of the way down in your picture style on the 7D. If this is correct, do you do any sharpening in post? If so, what range do you generally sharpen to? I did a few shots in "SuperFlat" when I needed a little more dynamic range and was generally pleased with the outcome, but I'm just curious if you do any sharpening to it since it's pretty soft. Thanks for all the help!

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Zachary Mattson

Sounds great, I will give that a try...just to clarify, you went with MPEG-2 at 25mbps, or just kept it at 12? I have another question, not really related, but I assume you bring the sharpness all of the way down in your picture style on the 7D. If this is correct, do you do any sharpening in post? If so, what range do you generally sharpen to? I did a few shots in "SuperFlat" when I needed a little more dynamic range and was generally pleased with the outcome, but I'm just curious if you do any sharpening to it since it's pretty soft. Thanks for all the help!

I was not the camera operator for the project so I am unaware of what sharpening was happening in the camera or the edit suite. The only thing I did in post was color grade and stabilize. And we shot on the 5D, not the 7D, so perhaps others could better answer your question.

As far as Mpeg2 was concerned, I pushed it as high as I could. I don't remember the exact rate now since I did it so many times.

[Zachary Mattson]

Will do, thanks again!