5DM2 to PAL DVD?
 

Ok....I think I already know the answer to this question, but has anybody successfully managed to take footage from the 5D to a PAL DVD end product without it looking like c#8p?

Am looking at a 5D or 7D purchase mainly for web video production (so the 30p of the 5D shouldn't be a problem) but I still get clients often requesting a DVD version of the final product and am obviously a little concerned that if I go down the 5D route that I will be creating a rather large rod for my back?!

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers in advance

Adrian P.

Most newer TVs and DVD players here in PAL land will play a 30p (or 29.97p) NTSC DVD without any quality issues. I recently produced a work for an exhibition in Sydney and just stuck with the NTSC format. The work looked as good as any SD output ever will. The key is getting the right HD to DVD workflow. Here's a thread that discusses different permutations

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/high-def...n-quality.html

My work flow is on page 7.

One slightly flawed way to test this out would be to do an undercrank (i.e. interpret 25fps-pal footage as 29.97fps footage) then output that to an NTSC DVD. Your footage will be a little sped up but you should be able to use the DVD that you create to test how various TV and DVD player combinations handle your NTSC output. Either that or search for and download a bunch of 5D ii clips and make an NTSC DVD from them which you could use for your tests.

Cheers Ben
 

Hey Ben thanks for the advice, was the project you refer to shot on a 5D? I just wonder if the exact 30fps of the 5D and not the 29.97 of NTSC is/was an issue.

Yes it was shot on the 5D. I work with the cineform intermediate which automatically converts 30p to 29.97 but I think an all 30p workflow should still produce an entirely playable NTSC DVD for those in PAL land.

Yes, I think so.

The reason that I didn't buy the 5D Mark II (and I've looked deeply into it several times) is mainly due to the simple reason that my films are targeted towards a Pal DVD audience worldwide, and a smooth post editing work flow is paramount. A section of my DVD buyers are from USA, but it is very small compared to the rest of the world, with the largest percentage in UK/mainland Europe/Australia/Asia...so Pal is the best option for me.

The 7D is a far better option than the 5D for people regularly making Pal DVDs due to the wider range of fps options. However, my reason for not yet buying the 7D are twofold. I much prefer Nikon cameras and want to hold onto my large selection of expensive Nikkors; plus the fact that I also do not get on with partial-frame cameras like the 'DX' D300s or 7D, and much prefer full-frame 'FX' DSLRs.

The latest Nikon D3s now offers me almost all that I want in a 5D package...but sadly it also offers similar headaches in editing for all of us needing to produce large quantities of Pal DVDs for sale.

I do not want to produce NTSC DVDs because of its slightly lower quality, but more importantly I could not risk sending out NTSC DVDs to thousands of customers in the hope that they all function properly in Pal DVD players, because a portion of them would not, and that would be a nightmare in the long run.

If your work is mainly for the internet, then it wouldn't really matter so much if you used any DSLR.

Down-converting to SD for DVD and also changing fps format to match 50i, or leaving the footage in NTSC in the hope that it will work on my customers TVs & DVD players is not a route that I want to go down.

Ben, I'm working with NTSC Blu-ray here in the U.S. This is a fairly low volume of BD-R disks, not production. I've been hesitant to send disks to PAL regions because I'm not sure what the odds are they will play. Do you know how compatible NTSC Blu-ray is with most PAL Blu-ray systems?

Blu-ray has more global compatibility than DVD, provided you stick to one of the standard resolutions and frame rates. 1080-24p, 1080-25p and 1080-30p will all play on all UK Blu-ray systems, as will 1080-25i, 1080-30i, 1080-50i and 1080-60i (in the case of 24p, the player will change the frame rate if the display isn't compatible).

Thanks for the info Stuart. I'm not really clued-in to the Blue-ray world. I'll be holding off on the on the upgrade until I really need to deliver in BR. Hopefully by then media costs will be lower, workflows will be smoother and BD-R discs won't have any weird playback problems.

The good news for us 5D owners in PAL land is that, at least in disc and screen/projector based media, it seems like we are moving beyond the format-compatibility problems.

For me the big issue with frame-rates is the awkwardness of doing multi-cam shoots with PAL video cameras. If this is going to be an issue for you the 7D looks like a better option.

If you deinterlace all your footage mixing 7D video with other PAL cams to produce a progressive PAL DVD should be relatively straight forward, (more info on this in the thread I posted above).

Thanks Stuart, that sounds encouraging; I think I'll send a few sample BR disks to Europe and see how it goes.

Years ago, i used this method for regular SD NTSC to PAL conversion Using Re:Vision Effects FieldsKit & Twixtor to Convert footage . It give me superb results, but it did take lots of time. You can skip deinterlacer, for conversion beetween progressive only footage.
bye

Hi everybody!

I have done some PAL DVD tests with my 5Dm2, Here is my workflow:

1. Original 5D footage
2. Edit with Premiere CS4
3. Export to a Full HD AVI with no compression (a good codec can be used too, Cineform, etc.), export audio in a separate file.
4. Import the Full HD AVI in a new Premiere project, interpret the footage as 25fps, accelerate 120% with twixtor (this implies some few settings in twixtor, mainly when there are fast movements). Add the audio file.

5. Export the new project with MPEG2 I-frame codec.

6. Build the PAL DVD with Procoder3. I perform the HD to SD conversion with Procoder too.

The results for me are good. I will try Virtualdub for resizing.

This takes a long time and the rendering in my PC (Core 2 Duo 3GHz, 6MB cache, 3GB RAM) takes about 4 hours to render 2 minutes of footage at Full HD!!!!

Be patient!

Tomeu Santandreu
Serra i Costes - Fotografia Mallorca

Which one of the Premiere Pro project Presets do you use for 5D projects?
HDV or others?

Cheers
Mitchell

Hopefully the 5D Mark II firmware update with 25P (due 'sometime' before mid-2010) will make things a lot easier for producing Pal DVDs and Blue Ray.