HD Movie Advise

[Infrared digital]

Thank you all for your help. Its good I asked the question because I had no idea that HD couldn't go onto a DVD.

Unknown, could you elaborate some more on your process as the programs you are using is exactly what we are using ?

For example, what settings do you use to set up in Premiere/AE?
How do you go between Premiere & AE ?
Did you export your final movie from Premiere to tape, if so where there any specific setting you used or didn't use?
Where there any tips or tricks you encountered during the process ?
We are going to film on a Panasonic HVX200 - did you have any problems downloading the footage to PC ?

I love doing digital video work but find it an incredibly difficult process so, any information you can provide me with will be well received.

[Da_elf]

usually i render widescreen format with hight of 480 and whatever the width would be for that. square pixel. then go through the entire editing process like that and finally at the end when compressing to mpeg2 will i set the PAR to compress the file to 720x480 (even though in my research there wasnt much quality difference between rendering animorphic and keeping it like that for the whole process or rendering quare pixel and compressing at the end. plus since i go to dvd i render at 24fps and compress at 24fps onto dvd since im NTSC and i love saving 6 frames a second

[panthon]

We are going to film on a Panasonic HVX200 - did you have any problems downloading the footage to PC ?

I have shot with that cam in the past and, as u must be aware, this is a P2 cam, so ideally no tapes are involved in the process (although it´s possible to record with tapes too, u wont get HD from that). You will need a laptop for "ingesting" the footage, as the p2 card itself is a pcmcia card, so u just need to plug it and use the P2 viewer and drivers from panasonic to complete the process. You will end with lots of MXF files, which are only compatible with some video apps out there, avid xpress being one of them and natively. Beware of the resolution u use, though. If u go 1080p, u are not likely to run into trouble, but if u use 720p, check if ur editor can handle that, especially with slow-motion shots (like 50p).

I would recommend 1280X720 progressive (aka 720p) because it wont be an overload for your machine and quality will be really good. There are some apps which can help dealing with the resulting MXF files. One of them is Raylight (http://www.dvfilm.com/raylight/)
and the others are the range of products from Cineform (http://www.cineform.com)

Hope it helps!

[Infrared digital]

Panthon, thanks for that, I will more than likely be in touch with you about this video camera.

[Infrared digital]

Hi Panthon

do any of these MXF file viewers work with 64 bit ?

[panthon]

Hi Panthon

do any of these MXF file viewers work with 64 bit ?

Im only using Raylight and not on 64 bit, so i can´t tell. But most of the video applications on the market aren´t 64 bit ready either so i would wonder if it's better to go 32bit at this point. Final Cut is the first i could think of using 64 bit on a mac. But neither premiere nor avid can. Not sure bout Vegas though.
Besides, video applications are not traditionally that memory-hungry: average would be 1.0 Gb ram filled.


You can consider Avid Xpress Pro too, which can handle MXF natively...

Anyway, raylight has a demo, just try it out and tell your experience.
There are 2 ways to work with Raylight. Owning premiere and just drag n dropping MXF into premiere's timeline, or converting MXF to Quicktime Wrapper files which are compatible with all video applications. I dont see why it shouldnt work in 64 bit...

[Infrared digital]

Hi Panthon

A bit of a gap here in this thread !

When I export from avid to AE I have been using the quicktime reference files but what do you use for going from AE to AVid ?

Thanks

N

[andrewjohn81]

A note to add also. Here in the US most tv's are NOT 720, but they are moving heavily in a trend for 1080p. I was just out shopping last night with a friend. The low end TV's are 720, but anything decent is 1080p.

If you are doing renderings for HD then I would do it for the higher resolution. You don't want it to actually look worse on the better TV. Also I would definitely stay away from rendering fields. You are much better off rendering for progressive scan and changing that later if you need.

Yes, HD IS square pixels, if you are talking about True HD. Some stupid companies are using other formats with non-square pixels and trying to claim those as an HD format, but you don't want to render for those unless the animation will Only be shown on that TV.

The best thing about HD is that there is no such thing as Pal and NTSC format between us all. We will all be using the same aspect ratio finally and the same frame rates. Well, at least as a standard. Some stations are broadcasting 720p, some 1080i.
There is definitely a noticeable difference between 720 and 1080 though. When you compare the two next to eachother there is a noticeable difference.

[panthon]

Hi Panthon

A bit of a gap here in this thread !

When I export from avid to AE I have been using the quicktime reference files but what do you use for going from AE to AVid ?

Thanks

N

I always use TGA sequences from Combustion to any editing application, being avid, premiere, etc. Quicktime references are nice but they are usually better when used locally. Although it's technically possible to create references across a network, it is a hassle. So, if disk space is not a problem, i would go for uncompressed quicktimes or image sequences.

Avid is quite picky, as it will reconvert all files into its own format, being OMF or MXF. Latest versions of AVID seem to favor MXF, though. Premiere won't convert anything but ull have to prerender it in order to mantain a decent playback. If u are a hardcore AE user, i would consider premiere as ur primary editing soft, since they are far more compatible and u can even copy/paste from one to the other.

[Infrared digital]

Thanks for that.

How do you convert your MXF files so that they can be read by Premiere ?

[trixian]

I' like to derail this thread slightly and hear what you guys know about hd-ready (720p) specifically. My tv is Samsung "something" hd-ready, bought a while back, but its resolution is something like 1360x768 (might me 1368x768 ). Stated somewhere in the manual and on the box.
This kinda makes sense to me as the whole PAL SD issue of non-square vs square pixels back in the SD days working in square PAL was 768x576 (leaving it square up to the point of printing to tape before going 720x576).
I even play movies on it through the pc, with the nvidia dualview rez set to 1360x768 60hz(vga cable) and this is the only configuration it will allow. All others show as a black screen with a "mode not supported" message.
So what is it doing with the extra pixels? Should one render to 1280 or 1360?
I'm very confused.

[Neilg]

1360x768 is a monitor standard, all HD video is 1280x720 and gets scaled/cropped/somewhat dealt with by the tv if its different.

What it actually does with the extra pixels i'm not sure, and couldnt find out - but the video standard is 1280x720 so thats what you need to render to.

[andrewjohn81]

If the resolution is not standard like that it usually means that the pixels aren't square.

So in your case the pixels are thinner than they are tall. Really there are no extra pixels.They just chose to use a nonsquare pixel, so in order to achieve the correct width they had to add more columns of pixels. The hardware then interpolates the 1280 to the other resolution. There is a significant quality loss for sharp details when doing that. Well, significant to us, not significant to most consumers. You really only notice a difference for sharp vertical edges/lines. If the edge of an "H" for example, ends exactly between two pixels at 1280, then it will probably not be the same at 1360, so the line will look much more blurry even though there are more pixels.

[paulison]

I agree, After doing some research a while back, we settled on 1080p


using square pixels makes a lot more sense than rendering with non-square pixels and getting hardware to stretch back out. I'm pretty sure that this was only done with DVD because of hardware limitations at the time - the disks initially would struggle to read the information off the disk at a fast enough rate and the hardware would struggle to decompress the full square pixel movie.

the HD standards are much easier to work work in my opinion and you end up with a much nicer and sharper result but its a trade off.... rendering time goes through the roof!. An opposing point to make is that with some work i did in vray, I thought that the DVD version actually looked better because of the smoothing and blurring added by hardware while stretching the pixels out.

I guess many peoples issue is the time it takes to render out frames at 1920x1080. I found that i ended up lowering noise settings and GI to try and speed things up and in the end kind of lost the advantages to rendering out in HD.