Pana 502 in DVCPRO50 is woeful...what am I doing wrong?

[David Cleverly]

Ok,

Tonight I shot another concert. I was going to start shooting in DVCPRO50 but decided that the show should fit on my cards, so I shot in 1080i.

The show didn't go as planned and went longer than thought, so I decided - to fit the rest of the show on my remaining card space - I would shoot in DVCPRO50 from 1/2 way and convert the HD stuff later. With the recent disappointment in quality shooting in DVCPRO, I stuck with the 50 variant which I have always been happy with. I have shot many concerts on DVCPRO50 before without issue.

However on my return home tonight I started ingesting the vision and - you guessed it - the DVCPRO50 stuff is all jaggies as the DVCPRO stuff was from last week. All I did was change the camera from DVCPROHD to DVCPRO50 as the recording format.

I have had this camera for two years and never had this problem before this and my previous shoot. Ok, I know HD is always better than SD, but this is so different it is ridiculous.

What am I missing here? HD is perfectly pristine, SD is suddenly woeful.

Have I unwillingly changed a setting somewhere? I don't know what it could be!

This is driving me insane and I would appreciate any help.

David

[Gary Nattrass]

Hi David is it not simply the field order that is causing you the problems with DVCPro?

HD is upper (Odd) and DV is lower (Even)

If you go in and set the field order to none in your edit system it should display OK.

[Daniel Epstein]

David,
I think Gary is on to something. How are you viewing the files? I had a problem with motion strobing when my Mac was set to a different graphic standard and some files played better than others.

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Gary Nattrass

.........is it not simply the field order that is causing you the problems with DVCPro?

I believe David first became aware of the problem when a client complained about the quality of the footage, and David's subsequent tests confirmed there is a problem. Hence it's unlikely that both of them have the same issue with field order. Also note that incorrect field order only shows up on motion - on a static scene you'll hardly see anything wrong, it just manifests as (very) jerky motion. From the description in the other thread, it doesn't sound like that problem, but does the problem come and go with motion?

The first thing I'd try is playing the footage directly from the camera to a monitor. Does that look OK? If not, what about live pictures fed directly to the monitor? And if the SD (DVCPro or DVCPro50) doesn't look good, what about HD, both live and recorded?