HDV Conversion

[Robert Mott]

Cannot get my HDV footage (1080i/60) to look good, even acceptable on DVD. Does anyone have any ideas.

Has anyone figured out how to originate in HDV, edit, and then compress for DVD? In my experience, the footage looks wonderful until you try to put it into DVD studio Pro. I have tried the Bonsai method with no results. I have tried to use compressor, Quicktime Conversion, and Quicktime Movie. Apple told me to just use the Quicktime Movie and put it straight in. That looked horrible.

One of the main problems with HDV what to do with the aspect ratio conversion.

Is there a better way to build a DVD, maybe without DVD Studio Pro?

RKM

[Gunleik Groven]

Hardly a red-related 4k workflow question... -;)
You'll find lots of info over at

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf

But HDV is a beast, even though itlooks good out of the cam.

Gunleik

[Alexis Hanawalt]

It depends on a whole bunch of things. If the footage was shot on a Sony camera, you're not going to get it to look good. If it was Canon or JVC, generally it will look better if it's upsampled to an uncompressed HD for color correction, then laid back to SD. The reason for this is that HDV has a tremendous amount of noise which is the worst thing for MPEG-2 compression. When the footage is color corrected in an uncompressed setting, the video image is essentially simplified. The most basic example of this, which is something you can take care of yourself, is the way you see lots of "dancing pixels" in the black areas of your HDV image. That's all data that the MPEG-2 encoding has to consider. If you crush the blacks so those dancing pixels are no longer there, the MPEG-2 encoding can write the whole block off as "black" and give you less compression for your bit rate. This is common for all of video - but HDV presents so much more of a challenge for compression because it's already so compressed.

[BASSAM MSSALATIE]

"dancing pixels"
.

i like it its very correct describing expression i had ever hear about HDV:)

[Alexis Hanawalt]

If you have DirecTV or Tivo, you can see a good example of what they're doing to maximize the value of compression by turning up the brightness on your TV. Both use MPEG-2 compression. Watch the darker areas and you can see large blobs of different shades of black moving around. This is what you want - rather than lots of static. (though you hope your end user won't turn up the brightness on their tv...)

[David Cubbage]

Hi RKM

I have been using DVD Studio Pro for a while now and I am very pleased with the results even when projected onto an 8ft screen. Although I am working with JVC's HDV 720p/25 at the moment and not 1080i/60.

I edit natively and export from the FCP timeline using the Quicktime conversion to Pal DV and set it to the 2pass... (can't remember what they call it) at the best settings, making sure I keep the original aspect ratio of 16:9 and check that progressive is selected.

I am very pleased with the results I have been getting but then I have never tried 1080i/60.

I have tried using Compressor before but was never happy with the results; lots of problems with scrolling text and transitions, especially dissolves. Since using the Quicktime conversion I haven't looked back.

Hope this helps.

David