I set that one up yesterday Perrone.

I just switched to it. The white walls in this room look amber.

John

Did you do a white balance?

You posted before I did. I fixed it. I had it on PRST which is 5600K according to the PP.

So I guess I shoot some stuff tomorrow and post back?

John

Yep. And put a clip up like you did today, and I'll take a look at it.

I can't thank you enough.
Regards,

John

Perrone,

I'm working on a project that was shot in 720 60p and will be delivered on standard DVD.
I'm going to assume that the work-flow you've described should also work well for me, correct?

Bob

Yes, should work fine. Not sure what the temporal movement is going to look like going from 60p to 60i though so report back! :)

It is usually a good idea to sharpen to reduce the softening that occurs when resizing from HD to SD. Does it matter if the sharpening is done before or after the resizing? In a similar vein, I use TMPGEnc to resize and sharpen in one operation. (I load Cineform HD into TMPFEnc and output resized SD MPEG) If it should be resized before it is sharpened, is TMPGEnc smart enough to do it in the right order?

I believe it is best to sharpen after resize from what I was told more than once.

John

Can someone please explain this workflow, if I don't have Cineform. I've downloaded TMPEG ENC 2.524 and Virtual Dub I was going to download AviSynth, but I am not sure how it functions. I currently have a edited project that has hd and sd clips on my timeline. The final input is for SD DVD. I rendered the project to .avi using NTSC Widescreen format. Was this the proper step? I need help. Also, it appears that TMPEG is used to convert the footage to Mpeg-2. How is this more effective them converting the footage in Vegas? Please describe the process/purpose of each step/progam in each step in the process. Thank you.

re: Maximizing HD to SD Quality
 

Hi Everyone,
I just want to thank Perrone Ford for sharing this information with us.
It's opened my eyes to experimenting to improve the HDV to SD/DVD (and
maybe BR/MPG4) output.

I've only been playing with a 120s clip of a Christmas tree zooming/panning.
Besides improving the sharpness there seems to be better contrast, and
when played I don't think I see as much blocking/creeping of dim colors during
pans. I noticed this on the walls besides the tree which were illuminated mostly
by the tree lights. Before the HDV->720x480 always seemed to have creeping
(not sure of the right term) wall colors. Now it seems much more consistent,
much less distracting, your eye stays on the tree being panned and is not
pulled away by seeming movement the wall.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed. It took several readings of
these 10 pages, and most of a day without other pressing needs to work
out was explained and examine the results along the way.

thanks
jim cowan
Pointe Vicente Recording and Post
l

Jim, You might be able to take your video quality up yet another notch by using Cineform as an intermediate editing format. It is a much more appropriate editing codec. IMHO any form of MPEG (or AVCHD) doesn't belong on the NLE timeline because of the block compression method that is used. There is a lot of technical information on their web site that explains the issues involved. http://cineform.com

While i still am using Cineform NeoScene I think it was Perrone saying it was lossy - is this a big penalty in using it?

It is VERY close to lossless. Completely lossless video results in enormous file sizes that are unwieldy.

Agreeing with Jim about Cineform; their marketing-speak is that it is "visually lossless", which I think is by and large true for everything shot with a camera.

If I remember correctly from previous posts, Perrone does some work with animation, in which he has found he must use a truely lossless codec to maintain the original quality.

With content shot with a camera, you have to go down many generations of Cineform before seeing degradation, although it is a "lossy" codec, by definition.

However, only you can decide how good is good enough for your projects. There's always one more step that will increase quality, at some increase in time and/or money .