HDV clips in a SD project

[RonnieMartin]

I have a project that is shot in SD 4x3 DVCAM. My B roll clips are HDV 1440X1080i (shot with the new EX-1). The DVCAM images look good but when I import a clip shot in HDV any horizontal lines are jagged and not even. If the camera moves any at all it is worse. For instance I have a short clip where a person takes an object from a shelf and the edges of the shelf look really bad. Reminds me of my old SVHS cameras. The clips viewed in HDV are stunning clear and perfect.

Is there something that I am doing wrong? Is there anything that will help the distortion when down converting HDV to SD within Edius 4.54?

My project settings are: out put format 720x480 59.94 4x3
NX E1 SD NTC
pixile aspect 0.9000
audio rate 48000 hz
sample size 16 bit
rendering format Canopus HQ

Thanks

Ronnie

[antonsvideo]

how is the HDV footage displaying in the 4:3 project? letterboxed or you used layout tool to fill screen?

if using layout tool, the closer you go to 100%, the less jaggies you should have

I would switch the EX1 to DVCAM rec mode if you need to mix footage with SD footage

I have not seen HD footage inside a SD project that looks as clean as SD footage in a SD project

catch 22 (if you know what I mean)

[RonnieMartin]

Hello Anton Thanks so much for your reply. I used the layout tool to convert the 16x9 hdv image to 4x3. It looks pretty bad.

If this is what I am to expect when I have SD and HDV footage in the same project then I had better hang on to my SD cameras.

I can see the same thing when I shoot a complete HDV project then down convert it to SD for SD DVD distribution.

I know that this topic has been beat to death on the forum but I am not pleased with the results when shooting HDV when the final product is SD DVD.

To save space on the forum I sent you a private message a duplicate of the above.

Would you please respond (PM) with your recommendations as to work flow when shooting HDV with the end product being SD DVD?

Thanks so much for your help. I have learned a lot from reading your informative posts.

Thanks
Ronnie

[antonsvideo]

Hi Ronnie

I am not the expert here, I am an SD 16:9 shooter, however I tested HDV footage in SD project and it did not look as good as SD (the footage has artifacts due to downscaling)

the idea of HD HDV is to ouput to Blu-Ray

have you tried the EX1 in DVCAM rec mode?

[Khoi Pham]

Why do you use the layout tool? if you have a 4:3 SD project, any 16x9 HDV clips place on the timeline will be automatic crop and resize and Edius does a very good job of resize imho, it is ProCoder that is bad, not Edius.
I just try it and it looks great, there should be no way that dvcam can look better than HDV clip shot with an EX1 on Edius SD timeline.

[antonsvideo]

Originally Posted by Khoi Pham

Why do you use the layout tool? if you have a 4:3 SD project, any 16x9 HDV clips place on the timeline will be automatic crop and resize and Edius does a very good job of resize imho, it is ProCoder that is bad, not Edius.
I just try it and it looks great, there should be no way that dvcam can look better than HDV clip shot with an EX1 on Edius SD timeline.

my SD DVCAM 16:9 footage looks better than any Canopus HD HQ Demo clip when placed in SD 16:9 project

however, the Canopus HD HQ Demo clips look superb in a 1440x1080i project

[Vaughan Wood]

Ronnie,

There are some helpful suggestions for converting for best results in Edius in the following forum thread.


http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=114690

Hope it helps,

Cheers Vaughan

[PaulTV]

Just to say that the EX1 does not support any SD format, it's HD only.

And yes it looks poor when downconverted, there's just too much detail, I've just produced a short film shot with 3 EX1's, final out to SD DVD and with an amount of soft focus tweaking, all looks Ok on the DVD, but it's not ideal.

There are many threads dealing with this issue - check out DVinfo.

The EX1 has huge amounts of detail, and looks fantastic at HD, I just don't think anyone has had to down convert such quality on their systems so far - I had no such issues with a shoot recently, on which I used 2 XDCAM 350's.

Try a detail reduction in camera.

I fear Anton is right, SD shoot SD out, looks best.

Paul

[AndyW69]

4.54 has made the conversion much better for me, I use xdcam hd and Z1. In earlier versions of edius it looked terrible in SD. I'm in PAL land. The early versions of edius were very good at timeline format conversion output, somewhere around v2-3 this became really bad, its much better again now. Its also worth checking field order as edius sometimes gets that wrong

Andy

[Khoi Pham]

Originally Posted by PaulTV

Just to say that the EX1 does not support any SD format, it's HD only.

And yes it looks poor when downconverted, there's just too much detail, I've just produced a short film shot with 3 EX1's, final out to SD DVD and with an amount of soft focus tweaking, all looks Ok on the DVD, but it's not ideal.

There are many threads dealing with this issue - check out DVinfo.

The EX1 has huge amounts of detail, and looks fantastic at HD, I just don't think anyone has had to down convert such quality on their systems so far - I had no such issues with a shoot recently, on which I used 2 XDCAM 350's.

Try a detail reduction in camera.

I fear Anton is right, SD shoot SD out, looks best.

Paul

The problem is not details, it is because ProCoder 3 or some Encoding software can not resize correctly from 1440X1080 to 720X480, the work around if you want to use Edius/Procoder is to switch your timeline to D9 before you encode to MPEG2, ( Edius do a decent resize) the other is to use another Encoder that can resize correctly, which I am slowly migrate to because I have been mentioning this scalling problem with ProCoder for almost 2 years now and nobody at GV seems to care. I hope GV take a serious look into this problem soon, cuz they already loosing customer like myself to other encoder that can resize correctly and also with much faster speed.