How to deliver a finished HD work?

[erdiaz]

Well, we are working with our HVX200 for a month now, made a little piece for my son's university work (he is in his last year of cinematography), we edited he 1080i and 720p undercrank footage in Avid Xpress Pro HD 5.2.4, every thing went fine untill we tryed to have the work in a presentation for his teachers.

We could not find a way to get the HD material exported well, when we exported to avi or QT this was ugly, noisy and defocussed, same when we get it back to P2 cards and downconvert to MiniDV; can some body tell me something about?

What is the best work flow to edit HD and get it in a format or support to deliver it to a festival, a client or TV station?

We have experience in Sd Dv but first in HD.

Thanks

:dankk2:

PD: sorry about my bad english

[andy_starbuck]

Sorry, I haven't used Avid.

In Final Cut you have to downconvert from HD to SD using Compressor to get the high quality output that will look good on a DVD. I assume you are talking about outputting SD to produce a DVD.

There are several methods in FCP to downconvert HD to SD. The first method is simply to export the HD sequence to the output mode you want. This produces the lowest quality results.

You cannot just drop an HD sequence into an SD sequence. You have to export the original HD sequence as an HD clip. Then import it. Then drop that clip onto an SD sequence and render it. This also produced fairly low quality results.

The third method that I've tried is to export the original HD sequence as an HD clip. Then drop it onto Compressor Batch, and use Compressor to output .m2v files for use in a DVD project. And this produced high quality results.

So you might want to try outputting the sequence into a single HD file first, and then using whatever compression tools are available to you to take that HD file as close as you can to a DVD format file, like .m2v which can be imported into DVD Studio Pro.

I don't know if this example will help, but it might give you some ideas for alternatives to try.

[pretopost]

There are several methods in FCP to downconvert HD to SD. The first method is simply to export the HD sequence to the output mode you want. This produces the lowest quality results.


You can also output a HD-DVD in DVD Studio Pro that can be played on any mac with Apple DVD player or pay the money to transfer to DVCPROHD Tape if they can play it.

We have found several local post and dup houses that will out files to tape formats for you for a reasonable fee.

[aravance]

If you can figure out how to export using the H.264 compression, you can put that on a SD-DVD. I find that preserves the quality better than down-converting the HD to SD and then onto a DVD.

[erdiaz]

:) Thanks to all of you, yes we have tried every possible way but did not work, while we see some pieces in the forum but we lost the thread.
"BRAIN STORM" by Chris Messineo and Riverbank, we download the movies and are very good, so may be those guys know what to do in order to get what we want.

Thanks a lot :)

[Chris Messineo]

Ernesto,

I just stumbled on this post. Are you still having trouble exporting your HD footage to SD. If so, let me know and I'll see if I can help.

Chris

[carlone]

From Avid export as a Quicktime REF (make sure you set it to 16x9).
Import that QT REF into a program that will do the compression for you (I use sorenson and cleaner, both work quite well).

If you're going to a standard DVD then make an mpeg2 oryou can try the 1080 or 720 settings if you are using DVD Studio pro (this disk will ONLY play on a newer mac running QT7).

That's it

[SomewhereinLA]

I agree, if you do have FCP, Sorenson (pro) and cleaner will do a good job.

[estimeh]

windows Media 9 HD That works

[BenB]

You cannot just drop an HD sequence into an SD sequence. You have to export the original HD sequence as an HD clip. Then import it. Then drop that clip onto an SD sequence and render it. This also produced fairly low quality results.

Actually, you can drop an HD clip directly into an SD Sequence and render it. But it's the lowest quality. The highest quality is to exprot the HD Sequence out directly to Compressor and pick your format.