I tried doing a REC709 to REC601 conversion., Looks pretty bad...greens get really juiced...almost neon in appearance.

OK, so what would be the best format to shoot for PAL SD
 

I along with many of you have not yet been satisfied with SD downconverts. HD is incredible. I will be spending more time soon to figure this out. I am sure there is a formula that works. A combining of a certain shooting format with a method of downconvert.... But...

I am about to start shooting a project today. The final project will be PAL broadcast via Satellite. If you had to reccomend a shooting format, what would it be? I am leaning to 720/25p HQ. I am wondering if this will work. Before I had my 2 EX1's I had three HVX cameras. I always shot 720/24p and was pleased. I even converted this to PAL SD and was pleased. (It was a pain, but I had a system that worked) I am wondering is part of the problem is going from 1080 down to 480. Anyway, let me know if any of you have reccomendations on what format to shoot in a few hours.

Guys, I've been following this thread with great interest. Last year I had similar problems with the V1E line twitter; I spent a couple of months before - "with a little help from my friends" - I definitely concluded the problems were all connected with the display devices/connections I was using. And not the sharpness, as Sony's own support was suggesting!

Ever since, neither my HD nor SD DVD Vegas projects, basing on the V1E recordings, needed any special treatment...

Same with the EX1 now: I am shooting HQ 1080/25p (mixed sometimes with 720p for over/under cranking); I'm editing in Vegas, rendering out without any unsharp masks, Gaussian blurs or alike, and burning two versions of disks (BD or SD DVD). No problems - and certainly not anything I could call "awful", as in the title of this thread. A bit of flickering here and there perhaps - but no worse than what I can see in Discovery HD broadcast!

Just keep proportions...

Has anyone tried 1080/25p with different shutter angles ? If so what are you findings ?
Or are people sticking with "speed" and shutter off ?

Paul.

Paul;

With 24p (or 25p in our area) shooting, the 180 degrees shutter is traditionally associated with the "film look". However, my experience is that it's OK to go waaaay up with the shutter speed - even as high as 1/250th - because otherwise you would need additional ND filters to keep iris open above f/8, which in my opinion is the diffraction-imposed limit.

Shutter off (i.e. 360 deg shutter) you may want to use in low-light conditions, to get that one stop of exposure more than you'd be able to use with 50i without introducing too much of the motion blur.

Speaking of motion blur: this is the only factor, in general, affected by the shutter speed. The shutter does NOT have any influence on the line twitter/flicker that have been the main subjects of this thread.

Thanks Piotr

Piotr, Im just wondering what conlcusion you came to which solved your display problems as i know i am having that particular problem (see my thread 'what would you do'). How do you have your setup configured which eliminated the infamous line twitter?

Two solutions exist:

- when palying back from a computer, use an MPEG software player allowing to switch deinterlacing off (like VLC or Nero Showtime), No bobbing !!! (blend is the second best to none)

- when playing from a DVD or BD, use a good player and a truly progressive capable input (usually HDMI on modern full HD, 1080p HDTVs)

Thats good to know, i was hoping for more of a solution for the twitter i see when monitoring on my monitor from my vegas timeline. Maybe a 1080p hdtv hooked up via dvi to hdmi to monitor my timeline would do the trick?

And I'm still hoping I can hand a client an SD DVD have them not see twitter. I can't tell them what TV or cables to buy and keep them as a client for SD DVD delivery.

Piotr,

It sounds like you're addressing problems specific to 23.976p footage. Adam, in his original post, was complaining about issues with 60i footage. With that type of footage, it doesn't seem like a progressive scan DVD player would make much a difference.

And Craig makes a very valid point; we have to deliver content to our clients that works on even the cheapest $25 DVD player from Wal-Mart hooked up to an old CRT, and also works coming off a high-end DVD player going to a 50" plasma.

Adam, any chance to test the files that have been uploaded for you?

Dennis, thank you for you advice. I currently have Adobe Premier Pro CS3 which doesn't import the HQ files. If I've understood you correctly Virtualdub can resize the orginal HQ files to avi at SD resoltion avi 720x540. Will I have to convert the mp4 wrapping to mpeg2 for Virtualdub to do this, if so how? I could then edit this avi in premier then export to DVD. At the moment I will be mainly producing SD dvds. Is this workflow going to produce the best high quality SD DVD? If I record using SP 1080i on the camera is it still worth going straight to Virtualdub then editing in AP or will it be worth importing through firewire then exporting to Virtualdub? I have not tried editing HDV in premier yet, does the rendering of transitions & application of effects loose quality, it this done in the same way on all NLE?

My camera has arrived today I would like to know the best step forward rather than spend days experimenting with different software! Vegas will edit straight from the HQ files, Premier wont, is my solution as simple as that?!

Others may disagree, but it seems to me that re-sizing and re-wrapping all of your individual clips prior to editing would be... cumbersome, to say the least.

I use Premiere Pro CS3 with the Matrox Axio hardware. It handles the MXF files (that Sony's Clip Browser generates) in real-time, be it HQ or SP mode. I always shoot in HQ mode. We paid for 1/2" chips at full 1920x1080... why throw that away before we even get to the edit?

It may be that PPro natively supports the MXF files, or it could be a Matrox proprietary thing. I would play around and see what works with your system.

You also could explore an intermediary codec like Cineform (http://www.cineform.com/products/Aspect-Prospect.htm) to see if that handles the files natively.

But now we're threadjacking. Sorry!

Mostly I would see Virtualdub becoming useful once your edit is complete - edit in the highest quality possible, and then export to your final delivery medium (SD DVD in this case) using Virtualdub or one of the other methods mentioned here.

No need to "manually" export to VirtualDub, you can frameserve to it.
And, I would strongly suggest you edit in HD(v) until you're ready for the final output before you resize. Thus, frameserving to Vdub should be your last step.

Jon, I too have the Axio LE + Premiere CS3 but have been unable to produce decent looking SD DVD's! Have you succeded in any way?

Yesterday I've done a side by side test with my DSR300 and EX1. The EX1 footage was played out of the HD timeline - outputted via the Axio breakout box as analog component and inputted to a DVCAM deck via component in - recorded the playback as letterboxed PAL DVCAM - then re-captured via firewire the SD PAL footage to an SD project. I then imported the SD footage from my DSR 300 and did a split screen between the two identical images (of my son).

The resultant picture is a shock - the footage from my 10 year old SD DSR300 DVCAM camera is like HD and the EX1 picture (downconverted to SD) looks like it has been shot with a Hi8 mm - and I'm not joking!

Today I've got hold of a Kramer SDI-Firewire converter and fed it SDI input from the camera and outputted DV into my DVCAM deck. The downconverted picture is unusable. People's faces look out of focus when I was 100% certain that I was focused.

I'm now at a loss - and I'm seriously considering getting rid of my EX1 and continue filming with my faithful DSR300. It is an unescapable fact that till now we still need to produce SD material - so Sony's insistence in filming in HD only is rather idiotic given that cost effective technology is not yet available.