Edit XDCAM EX-1R in HD or SD in FCP6?
 

OK, guys, I'm goo goo over my new EX1r. Between shooting modes, settings, picture profiles, etc., I'm semi-brain dead! Will someone please tell me if I should edit my HD video in a SD timeline in FCP6. Doug Jensen of Vortex Media states in his EX1 DVD that you should edit in a SD timeline because if gives you more versatility. Forgive my ignorance but I don't understand. What is the need for HD editing if you can edit in SD? A friend of mine says its the size and processing of the HD and the resources it ties up. True? And if it is recommended that editing in SD is the way, does it in any way change quality of the finished product? Again, forgive my ignorance, as it is obvious that there are some brilliant people using this forum. Thanks.

I plan to shoot almost everything in 1920 x 1080p, 30.

Chuck

If I remember his tutorial correctly, he recommended that if you're going to DVD.

EDIT: Oopsie. I must have hit the button at the same time as Greg.

If i remember correctly... I think doug said cut your sequence in a hd timeline, and then copy the hd sequence into a fcp sd timeline for the down conversion.

If someone, a client, wants the product in hd later and you only have sd that would negatively affect your bottom line.?

Greg

It is recommended that if your ultimate goal is to deliver in SD that you shoot in 720p. The reason is that there is less edge detail/ to worry about and the downconvert to SD will look better. Truth be known I've not had the time or inclination to carry out my own test but I can direct you to Alister Chapman's blog where he explains everything in detail.

XDCAM-USER.com Getting SD from HD and the problems of oversampling.

The other big secret to getting good SD from HD is to use the flicker filter in Final Cut Pro to avoid the dreaded line twitter. I find that the best result is to use the "high" setting. Alister also talks about this in his article. To quote Nero's executive officer in the latest Star Trek movie: "Your refusal (to read Alister's article) would be unwise."

- Don

A couple things have been posted here that aren’t correct about the settings and workflow I recommend. That’s perfectly understandable, you can’t remember everything some other guy says. So, just to set the record straight, here’s what I recommend on the EX1, EX1R, and EX3.

Always shoot at the full 1080 resolution of the camera unless you need slow-mo. If you need slow-mo, only shoot the slow-mo clips as 720 and shoot everything else as 1080.

Never shoot interlaced.

Shoot 30P unless you’re actually going to transfer to film. In that case, you can use 24P, but I don’t recommend it for any other reason.

1080/30P downscales to SD just fine. It is NOT necessary to shoot 720 for excellent SD DVD or web delivery.

You know what you get when you shoot 720? Inferior raw footage that won’t have much use in the long run when 720 and SD are dead. Is that a benefit? I think not. 1080 downscales to SD just fine. You can see examples of that every day on broadcast TV and a lot DVDs where 1080 that has been down-rezzed to SD. If someone else can do it – you can to. Shooting with the camera’s maximum resolution is never a bad idea. It doesn’t matter what your final output is going to be, shoot at the max resolution all the time. Why do you think 4K, and 2K are gaining popularity when there is really no way to release anything at those resolutions? Why does a professional photographer want an SLR with as many megapixels as he/she can get? Why would you buy an HD video camera and then use it to only shoot medium definition? 720 isn’t even true HD.

I can assure you that 1080/30P is the future. Not 720, not 24 fps, and not interlaced.

Edit with sequence settings that match your output.

If you’re never going to release your video in HD, why edit it in HD? For example, if you’re only going to deliver your video on DVD, then just edit with your NLE’s best DVD settings. The format of your raw footage makes no difference. As I point out in my training DVDs, there are some big benefits to editing in an SD timeline with HD source footage. Why give those up if you’re never going to need an HD master?

However, if you are going to release your video in HD (or want to have that option in the future) and DVD, then by all means choose the NLE’s best HD sequence settings and then down convert to SD after the editing is done. Your workflow should be determined by your output and not by your source footage.

Here’s my workflow for creating standard definition DVDs with Final Cut Pro.
Vortex Media: VIDEO & PHOTO Tools and Training

If you disagree with anything I have said, that’s fine, but I’m not going to get dragged into a discussion of progressive vs. interlaced or any other debate. I already know what works and what doesn’t. So if you disagree, then do it your own way but I’m not going to debate it. My purpose in posting on this thread is just to set the record straight on what I recommend.

I generally agree with Doug but I do have a couple thoughts on this.


Never say never. I expect with many of my projects for DVD, Blu-ray may well follow in the near future. It might be better to edit in HD and then cut and paste the entire edit in to an optimally set SD timeline.

The reason why Alister came to his conclusion as he's gone through the same hair pulling the rest of us have in downconversion. I know I have. Yet I agree with Doug on using 1080p30. That's why I think editing HD and then copying into SD timeline. It may take some tweaking though.

One question I do have about Doug's workflow is that he's using a DV timeline for SD. I'm not sure why he's recommending that. I'd think you'd get better quality with a ProRes timeline . . . unless using DV really helps with the "line twitter" people get. This is really where people run into issues with downconversion. Shooting thin lines at 1080p (I've seen it with thin tree branches for example) tend to twitter. There's also scaling issues as Alister points out. Doug's own DVDs verify that editing in an SD timeline in FCP can work though.

I think what many of us are looking for is a method to edit in an HD timeline (even YouTube and Vimeo allow for full 1080p viewing now) for Blu-ray and then SD for DVD.

The other quandary is that Blu-ray doesn't include 1080p30 as part of the spec and this often moves people to 1080p24 which is. Alternately there's 1080i60 which is also part of the spec but for many reasons (probably the same as Doug's) I'm no fan of interlace.

Since we mention delivery I'd thought I'd list the possibilities which is why this is such a quandary.

I apologize to PAL folks for my NTSC orientation

NTSC Broadcast - 720p60, 1080i60 or 1080p24 with pull down.
Blu-ray - 1080p24, 1080i60
DVD - 720x480 (displayed as interlace although as Doug notes you can set fields to none)
Web - Progressive (must deinterlace is source is interlaced)

if one needs to convert to PAL it seems to be easiest from p24 (speed change) or i60 (has enough fields to create 25fps).

Your head will spin with all the possible workflow issues. This is why Alister handles one way and Doug another.

Personally I really wish Standard Def would go away. For many of my clients I deliver HD file if they need to distribute but some MUST have DVD and that's truly the monkey wrench in all this.

Others shy away for 1080p30 (although it's my choice too) since it isn't either Broadcast or Blu-ray spec and winds up as i60 will less temporal resolution.

Blu-ray and broadcast TV don't need 30P.
If you take 30P and convert it to 60i for delivery, the results look exactly the same as if you were watching 30P. What you get is two interlaced fields that, when viewed together, look exactly the same as the original progressive single frame. 30P gives you the best of both worlds -- a progressive look without all the pulldown hassles of 24P.

This is the origin of my statement about using 720p if your intent is to deliver in SD:

From Alister Chapman's Blog:

"720P downconverts much better as you have less resolution to start with. It’s very counter-intuitive, the lower the resolution you start with, the better the end result."

As I said in a previous post, I've not carried out a test yet to see whether 1080p makes a better SD version or 720p does. What I do know is that the Flicker filter in FCP makes a substantial difference in the line twitter issue. Adam Wilt goes a different route and applies a small amount of the blur filter. Whatever works.......

For the record I always shoot in 1080 30p unless a client requests interlaced to match previous shoots from someone else's footage. Or unless I've been over-cranking and have forgotten to put it back to 1080p. Done that more than once.

- Don

There's a classic tale of a British children's TV show from 1966 called Camberwick Green. Colour TV was still 4 years away in the UK at this stage and nobody was shooting in colour other than to sell to the USA (eg The Avengers).

The series was an independent production commissioned by the BBC. The producers, at their own expense, shot the series simultaneously on black and white as well as colour film. It was a stop motion animation and I believe they ran the cameras side by side.

Naturally they provided the BBC with the black and white version (as contracted), but a few years later were able to sell the BBC the colour version thereby generating more profit thanks to being far sighted.

And as a result of being shot in colour, the series was repeated on TV right up until the late 1980's. If it had been black and white this simply would not have happened.

I'm not saying this applies to HD, but it is a great example of people being far sighted enough to not only profit from some extra outlay up front but also generate repeat fees that the black and white version would never have done.

I don't find shooting and editing in HD a pain at all even if the final product is SD. Perhaps I'm foolish, but perhaps I might see the benefit further down the road?

Out of interest Marcus do you shoot 1080i or 25p?

Depends on the circumstances. For the retail DVD I've just completed I shot 1080i. However that was dictated by the "B" camera being a Z1 so in fact the EX1 was running in HDV 1080i mode anyway. The material suited the more flowing motion of interlaced video as well.

Interlaced video gets you smooth movement but of course is a pain for anything that might be going online or onto a computer based format. I tend to pick a format depending on the project and generally find 720p@25fps is something of a sweet spot. Works well on a computer screen but also down converts to SD DVD nicely.

Marcus,
Thank you! You have just shown why it is foolish to shoot anything in 720. 720 is today's "B&W". 1080 is today's "color". I don't buy into the argument that 720 downconverts to SD better than 1080, but even ifthere was some marginal difference, I'd rather have my raw footage shot in 1080 so it is future proofed. Your Camberwick Green example perfectly illustrates the importance of future-proofing your raw footage.

Your argument that someone should edit in HD when only SD is going to be needed doesn't hold water for me. I can guarantee that a lot of the stuff I work on will never be released in HD so there's no reason to edit, render, and build graphics and animations in 1080 -- just so I can waste more time downconverting all that at the end of the workflow. That would be a ridiculous waste of effort.

If you stop and think about your Camberwick Green case study, they are talking about shooting in the best format -- not post. That is exactly what I am advocating. You can always re-edit something in HD, but once the raw footage has been shot in a lower format, you're screwed.

720p to 1080p isn't as big a jump as from b/w to colour. On most current displays, Joe Public (i.e. nobody who posts on here) wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The common complaint I hear about broadcast HD is that people can't see the difference from SD. My wife sits in front of the TV watching HD versions of shows complaining she can't see the difference. I of course can see the difference, but perhaps I know what I am looking for?

1080p is the future but you are pushing the codec harder (more pixels). TV's upscale 720p very well indeed (or at least the two native 1080 panels I have in the house do).

Of course, if I was in the business of broadcast production I'd be shooting 1080 all the way. That's an absolute no brainer frankly. But for those of us doing non-broadcast work on the usual limited budgets 720p presents a reasonable path. We get to ditch interlaced video with all its problems when a multi platform delivery is required and we get pictures that make the client go "wow" with hardly any extra effort during the edit.

Doug, I know you're not in the mood to argue this workflow issue over and over and, for what it's worth, I've followed your 1080p30 lead since I got my EX1 and a copy of your DVD. But I was stunned when I read this thread over on LAFCPUG the other day as Jeff Harrell was SO adamant about 30p being something of a bastard child of the formats. Some of you might find this thread interesting and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts:

lafcpug Forums :: Café LA :: OT: 60i vs 30psf, or "Why does my footage look like butt?"

dave

I shoot HD EX1 & my old PDW 350 XDCAM every day in both P&I as this is client based productions going out to SD DVD.

I edit on FCP6 & 7 in a SD PAL seq setting for every one of theses productions and they come out looking fine.

Interlaced has it's problems with line twittering every now and then but I get around this with a flicker filter. I would prefer shooting 25p but most clients are just happy with the interlaced look.

Cheers

Dave,

Jeff's article is a fine explanation of the scientific differences between interlaced and progressive. So what? Maybe some people will find that kind of detail interesting. I did not. I am not a person who cares very much about what is going on "under the hood" of any equipment or technology. I am more interested in how to use it to get the results I want. Some people are mechanics and some people are drivers.

If he thinks interlaced looks better to him, great, he can shoot interlaced. I think interlaced looks like crap and no amount of technical explanation is going to change that. Of course interlaced looks "smother" -- that's what's wrong with it! The goal has never been to make progressive look like interlace.

I think progressive looks better to my eyes and the workflow is extremely easy. That's all I need to know. If progressive is so awful, then why is 99% of the programming I watch on broadcast television, DVD, and Blu-ray all shot progressive? The argument that somehow progressive can't be done well is flat out wrong.

Like it or not, progressive is the future, so if someone is a professional in this industry he/she better get a handle on how to shoot, edit, and deliver it properly. That is the bottom line.

Gary Adcock said it best when the original EX1 was barely on the market and he was being interviewed at a trade show with the EX1 in his hands: "Interlaced is a delivery format, not an acquisition format."

- Don

There are two primary reasons why I recommend 720P and this was originally aimed at EX1 and EX3 owners that needed to shoot for SD when the cameras have no SD mode.

Reason one is that 720P is easier to downconvert and will give most people fewer issues, basically it's harder to make a hash of it.

Reason two is that if you are looking to produce interlaced SD you will get a much better IMHO end result by shooting 720P50 or 720P60. You don't get any field issues during the down convert (1080 fields don't go into SD fields neatly due to the way odd numbers of lines have to be dropped/rescaled) but you still get fluid motion as each of the 50P frames gets turn into a 50i field.

I agree with Doug that if HD is needed then you should shoot 1080P, but there are many jobs that I do that will never see the light of day in HD. They are one off marketing DVD's or similar and for these I'll be sticking to my 720P to SD workflow.

When delivering the best-looking results in SD, I've always used "oversampling" as my number one guiding principle. Which is to say, shoot in the highest possible resolution and a great deal of the detail and "look" is maintained when you downconvert to SD. My original thinking on this was greatly influenced by posts from Graeme Nattress, here on DV Info. Back around 2005 I did tests shooting a scene using my JVC GY-HD101 in SD and then in 720p and looking at the downconverted results (of the 720p) against the SD on a DVD. To my eyes, the downconverted 720p looked more detailed in addition to the progressive "look" (which is more to my personal taste as well).

The most startling recent demonstration of the value of oversampling has been on certain Hollywood Blu-rays of older movies. I've gotten a couple of Blu-rays of older movies (originally released at least 10 years or more ago) where, fair dinkum, it doesn't look much better than the SD DVD version. It made me wonder whether they'd just used the original scan they made for the original DVD and simply threw that out in a 1080p format as a Blu-ray.

But when I watched the "Goldfinger" Blu-ray, my eyes nearly popped out of my head! Such richness of detail and "feel". It made it seem like you were right in the room with them. You could even see where the make-up artist had covered up a pock-mark or pimple on Sean Connery's left cheek. It turned out that they had done a 4K scan of the original negative and then downconverted to 1080p. A great example of the value of oversampling.

The final surprise for me concerning just how well oversampling can hold up all the way down to SD was from the "North by Northwest" Blu-ray, also done from a 4K scan. All of those extra details (which weren't there on the original DVD) are vivid in 1080p. But what surprised me was when I watched a doco in the special features, done in 480p. It used a number of shots from the 4K scan and a great deal of these extra details (not present in the earlier SD DVD release) were still clearly visible in this 480p version. (I didn't think that sort of detail would still hold up all the way down to SD resolution, but I was pleasantly surprised!)

I'm not sure exactly why oversampling works so well with downconversion. I've guessed that maybe it's analogous to the sampling of sound where, even though the range of human hearing isn't supposed to go above 20 kHz, it's always sampled at more than double that (about 44 kHz and up) to get higher quality results.

Up until Alister made his post, I've confidently felt that 1080p25 would always give the best results for SD DVD (after downconverting), purely due to oversampling. I pay a lot of attention to what Alister says and his comments about scaling problems of 1080p into 576 lines of PAL SD concern me greatly. Up until recently, I've always shot 720p with my JVC and gotten excellent results with SD downconversion using Compressor. But now that I've just moved up to 1080p with the EX1R (like Doug, I believe that 1080p is the future in terms of the displays people will be watching, rather than 720p) I want to offer my clients the clear oversampling benefits of a 1080p25 capture downsampled to SD DVD. But I also don't want to be introducing anything to the detriment of the image if I'm understanding Alister correctly. (Maybe I'm not.) I don't know if Alister is able to clarify his comments or provide more info about this. I'll obviously now do a lot of testing for myself on this point. I'm okay at the moment with the projects I'm shooting in 1080p25 because the delivery requirements are in both SD DVD and Blu-ray. But later projects might not be. So I'm very interested in more info about this possible pitfall.

Say it isn't so!
 

OK, I've followed Doug Jensen's methodology for making a DVD with HD footage using an SD timeline in FCP 6, then on to DVD Studio Pro. I spent most of the day experimenting with different settings as well -- which leads me to my question.

Doug eloquently stated the logic of using a SD timeline in FCP if the output commands it. But what settings do you use to make a 1920 x 1080p DVD? I tried h.264 but got an error message 'incompatible format.' I tweaked the bit rate settings, tried everything I know of short of converting it to 720p.

Why spend hard-earned money to buy a high-end HD camera if you can only enjoy the HD quality on your computer? From all that I've been able to find on online forums, it's not possible to author a true 1920 x 1080p DVD. True? How are working professionals like you getting your clients true 1920x1080p video? Please advise. Thanks.

Chuck

Chuck, without getting too snarky about this, have you looked at the specs for DVD's? It's a Standard Definition format so why are you trying to cram HD content onto it....unless you're making a hybrid BluRay disk.

David, no offense taken. You make a good point. All I'm trying to do is see what kind of quality my new EX-1r is capable of producing. So far, I'm impressed with what I see coming from my SxS card, but have been less than thrilled about how my video looks once I export it out of Final Cut. What format/ workflow are you using to showcase your work to clients?

I know exactly what you mean. I had owned my EX1 for almost a year before I could actually see the footage on a true HD set! I now have a Sony XBR 32" 1080 set hooked up via a Matrox MXO2 interface box and life is good....except for the lack of a RAID setup!! ;-)

Most of my paid work has been delivered to clients who will view it in SD (mostly for web use) or for DVD's with my family history business. However, with YouTube and services like Vimeo and ExposureRoom, you can put up lots of HD content for client review. Here's the most recent HD clip I posted of an interview with a very colorful old gentleman. This was shot in 1080/30p and compressed to .mp4 for online use:

Dave Morrison On ExposureRoom