Is there any decent way to down-covert 5D2 footage to 16 x 9 SD for CS4
 

Hi All

I really need a way to down convert 5D2 footage to 16x9 SD for editing on a couple of slower machines I have here.

I have attempted doing it with Adobe Media Encoder but with the various options I have tried the results end up looking crap and unusable i.e. Like stepping in diagonal details which are emphasized with movements.

Is there any software or options that allow you to down convert cleanly. (like how sony HDV cameras can output SD). I downloaded a trial of cineform neoscene but that doesent appear to have any down conversion options.

Any advice would be great appreciated.

Cheers

Craig.

Try this
Precomposed Blog - HD to SD DVD - Best Methods

Yes, but you'll have to do some searching on the net. First, get the latest version of virtualdub. Then, search for the mpeg4 plugin so you can import the clips. Rename all your footage to a .mp4 extension (something like extension changer might help). Last, you'll need a utility to make the batch job for virtualdub. Be sure to select lanczos as the scaling method in the resize filter's dialog.

cheers guys, I will give those options a try,
The example in the blog is exactly the problem I am experiencing,
The blogs comments presented another option I may try also. I am using RT.X2 with premiere. So I may be able to import the footage into a SD sequence and take adobe out of the HD-SD process, leaving the conversion up to Matrox.

I'm starting to wonder, although this would be the most space/time consuming method, if turning your footage in to an image sequence and then cropping to the correct dimensions in Photoshop and recompiling the image sequence back in to a video file would be the best way to do this? My head bursts at the idea of this for big projects, but really it's computer time and not personal time involved since it's a simple action you can apply to a folder of images. But what am I missing here? This sounds too simple that you would expect this to be the standard way in something like Premiere Pro (just changing the dimensions and compiling the frame).

You might want to try Cineforms second tier product, I think it is called Neo HD. NeoScene does not do conversions, but the next level up does I think. I actually convert all my 5D footage and edit in Cineform intermediate because it is easier on the equipment. You might find on the older machines that you can edit the HD material from NeoScene in high definition.

Take a look at Cineform.com, they have two week full trials available to you.

I have used TMPEGEnc with fantastic results. It costs money but not a lot and for basic editing and conversion its the best, IMO.

TMPEGEnc can output series of frames as lossy jpeg or lossless bmp. It also can assemble series of pictures into a video. I have used this feature to gain access to some Photoshop and/or Gimp image processing that is difficult to find for video. It is an excellent work flow for some types of processing.

I really enjoy the large number of options TMPEGEnc gives you even though I bought it for it's superior MPEG-2 encoding capabilities.

TMPGEnc - Products: TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress Product Information

TMPEGEnc is fantastic - it has been tested many times as the best of the MPEG2 compressors. (I can post links to comparos between various compressors).

Infact, many believe TMPEGEnc does better mpeg2 than Cinema Craft Encoder !!!

TMPEGEnc is just that good. I have been using it for several years now. The DVD I made last night had the final mpeg2 conversion done in TMPEGEnc.

Really this would be a great way to do it results wise, however based just on my experience batch processing stills for time lapses, watermarks etc, For a wedding video it would probably take a week to convert.

cool I will have to check out NeoHD also. I thought I looked at some of their products but didn't see anything specifically saying downconversion. Might have missed that.

Will also check out TMPGEnc. Does it output AVI though?

oh yeah also, Looks like the "Export from Matrox SD sequence" was a fail also. The quality looked worse than AME some reason. The computer becomes very unstable while doing it too. Crashed the project twice.

Interesting tip Rick.
I've got TMPG and am going to experiment with this.
Thanks.

I'm more interested with Luis de la Cerda workflow using virtualdub. It seems faster this way. We can batch process numbered of files. Instead of set them one file at a time in TMPGEnc.

So, Luis can you tell us more about your workflow? I tried to feed 5D file straight to virtualdub, vdub doesn't understand it. I even tried renamed the extension from mov to mp4. Doesn't work. So we need MPEG4 plugin you said? What MPEG4 plugin do you use along with this? (isn't that 5D files are H.264 not MPEG4?)

h.264 is the same as MPEG-4, Part 10.

wouldnt it be much much easier just to make a new sequence fitted to the SD delivery format, and let the NLE downscale the footage in the project timeline while editing? I do that often, with no noticable quality loss (exept the expected SD resolution)

I have done a comparison between 1080p exported from a PAL sequence in After Effects (AE does the rescaling) versus a full 1080p export subsequently downsized in Virtual Dub using Lanczos rescaling algorithm - and the second way is much better indeed. Much sharper.

@Nik Skjoth
For small project you might be able to do so. But it's not ideal to do it for a big project with thousands of clips. You'll be spending all your production time scaling those clips one by one in the timeline.

@Mike Hannon
What plugins do you use for Virtualdub to be able to read your 5Dmk2 files?

Hi Desmond,

I convert with Neoscene first, so I'm importing an AVI.

Not really... Premiere Pro CS4 allows you to make sequence setups of multiple formats in one single project. So you can simply do your edits in native res and after you are done, you do a "copy paste all" to a new sequense in SD, and while having everything selected you just right click and press "scale to frame size" voila!

Or you can throw the whole HD sequence into the SD sequence and scale it to frame size. Just like working in After effects with precomposed sub sequences... Easy as pie.

Nik that's just a neat trick. I didn't see/notice that feature before. I know we can do this in after effects.

Just wondering if anyone has had any luck with this method specifically with Canon5D files.
I managed to download it all and install the quicktime plugin but it keeps saying "unable to locate video codec to decompress video track"

Any ideas?

Cheers

TMPGEnc has a batch processor that's implemented in a common sense way (click on the "register batch process" instead of "start encode").

@ Rick Hill.
Virtualdub as of now doesn't understand Canon 5Dmk2 files. It doesn't have a codec to read in those 5D files. Hopefully they'll have an update for this soon.

So I exported an image sequence and resized each frame in Photoshop to SD image size. It was 10 minutes of footage and the export and resizing took about 4 hours on my 2.33Ghz 4G RAM Macbook Pro. Sounds like a lot of time, but really not with my specs. The import and saving of the new image sequence took maybe another 40mins. Thing is then I would have to re-render it again with sound put back in.

Anyways, the outcome was much better then any other option I've tried. I didn't get the moire and aliasing in the footage I was getting by just having adobe media encoder render my project out for DVD.

I compared the DVD to an actual Hollywood DVD played back in the same player on the same HD monitor and the jaggizes on diagonals were about the same. I think our perception is so critical because we see this great HD footage and used to believe the DVD was such a "perfect" format 6-7 years ago that we can't accept all the flaws we now see that probably were always there but we accepted it. Until HD came around.

I don't understand why AME isn't just taking each frame and resizing it like Photoshop does? Yes this would be time consuming, but shouldn't we have this option at least?

sounds like it could be a work flow for a short film or something but very time consuming.

I have found that the problem isn't that noticeable going straight to dvd. Basically I have found the following:

Canon 5D mov -> Matrox 1440x1080 AVI -> Edit -> SD Mpeg DVD = acceptable

Canon 5D mov -> SD AVI -> Edit (looks bad already) -> SD Mpeg DVD = still looks bad