Hd->sd
 

First , I am a totally well experienced Vegas user for years now (since Vegas 4.0).

Working on a masterpiece for german television I again run into its limits (?).

I have very HQ , fine detailed HD Material (XDCAM HD422 & 420) that needs to be converted into SD.
For my normal projects I simply set render as to DV AVI or IMX MXF and render it with "best" settings, "interpolate" in project setting.

I always found horizontal or vertical lines to be very "flickery" as a result of the downscaling. It looks like Vegas does not deinterlace the HD Material properly before resizing.

What is your best HQ approach to this?

If needed, I can provide some raw shots in HD via my server, so you can test it.

Thanks

Uli

Uli,

The problem is not just the deinterlacing; it's the resizing alogarithm itself. Vegas (and most other NLEs) do not use the proper resize alogarithms. They do a poor job at resizing interlaced content.

I edit and render my final AVI using Cineform 1920x1080. I then do my downscaling and MPEG-2 encoding in TMPEG and I'm very happy with the results. TMPEG use Lanzcos-3 downscaling which is supposed to be the best.

And no better with progressive content. You get a much better result with the free AVsynth and VirtualDub. Another thing you might try is adding a one pixel gaussian blur to some scenes before you downsize - the blur is not evident on the downsized version and it could reduce the flickering.

I never used cineform - there are different versions on their website... what package do I need at least ror trying?

Thanks

Uli

Take a look at the http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-hap...d-quality.html thread as this was discussed at great length with several excellent suggestions.

I'm using Neo HD. This has the added feature of First Light which is real time color correction on a metadata level. Cineform Neo Scene is the more economical way to go but has some limitations. I like to upsample my HDV to full HD and I am not sure if Neo Scene allows that. I know it works fine for AVCHD.

Also I don't think you have to use Cineform to get better DVD files. I would just export in whatever file format you use and try out TMPEG for the downscaling and encoding. There is a Sony Codec included in Vegas which some people seem to prefer to Cineform.

Marc