Screwed on SD Transfers.

[Mike Prevette]

So I had a week long shoot that got transcoded last week down to SD (center punch from 4k HD files) using the .9 fit height setting to 720x486 Uncompressed 10bit QT files.

Everything looked right, and processed quickly BUT big motherfucking BUT. . .

I get a call today asking if we transferred Anamorphic!!!! O holy fuck sure enough I looked in final cut (with correct pixel aspect ratio) and everything looked like it came out of a spaghetti western. After some fiddling it looks like RED's ".9 fit to height" is actually doing a PAL pixel correction. IE if I change the clip to "pal CCIR 601 " in FC everything looks fine except its not tall enough to cover NTSC so there is letterboxing NOT WHAT THE CLIENT WANTED. Now I'm stuck re-rendering everything SQ pixel and passing it through a conversion to make it CCIR 601.


BAH

[Deanan]

Sounds like you probably wanted .9 fit width but it's hard to tell.
Can you email me screenshots of how you set it up?

[Mike Prevette]

What I want is 720x486 NTSC CCIR601 CENTER PUNCH files from my 4kHD material.

making a 720x 486 file with "fit width .9x" compresses the makes an anamorphic file (full 16x9).

a 720x486 "fit height .9x" creates a double compressed file when loaded into FC.

I'm doing tests now trying to do a center crop first then a .9 fit width and height, but that seems like it's creating issues.

[Mike Prevette]

To be clear what I did originally was a 720x486 fit height .9x convert.

[Mike Prevette]

Shakes fist at sd standards

[Mike Prevette]

Anyone else having problems with SD output?

[Deanan]

Emailed you a test build to see if that does what you expect.

[Mike Prevette]

Thanks Deanan,

trying it now.

[Mike Prevette]

Well the test build Deanan sent me works as I hoped. That is in "fit height .9x" mode it first scales a center punch of the picture to 720x540 then does a .9x vertical squeeze to output a 720x486 standard SD file (my output pixel dimensions are set to 720x486).

Can't thank you enough! I was re-rendering everything and then having to step through 2 additional steps to get the quicktimes in the shape I needed. This is going to save me hours tonight (hours that I didn't have). This project is being cut in NYC so It's always an extra bit of tension when files need to be shipped across the country.

[Mike Prevette]

I can't wait till this stuff goes away, along with interlacing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_aspect_ratio