DVX footage on 50 " Plasma HDTV

ccroo

ccroo

Well-known member
Dear folks:

DV footage looks pretty crummy on a 50" Plasma screen, right?

I think so, and there is no reason to expect otherwise.

But, it should look as good as a DVD, right? If so, what factors come into play?

What should I keep in mind when shooting for a 50" plasma with a DVX100B?

Thanks!
 
Thank you, that makes very good sense.

Any other ideas?

I want to match the quality of HD mastered on a DVD played on a 50" plasma. (That's funny, I think.)
 
DVX footage won't match an HD transfer no matter what you do. You can still get a lot of detail from close up and medium shots though. I would shoot as much of these as possible. Long landscape shots look pretty bad on a screen that big.
 
turn your shutter to 1/60 if your shooting for a big screen, it will appear a bit sharper then at 1/48th or 1/50.
 
Keep the camera in progressive mode if the TV is rated progressive. Burn a DVD of it and put it in an up-converting DVD player.
 
ccroo said:
Dear folks:

DV footage looks pretty crummy on a 50" Plasma screen, right?

I think so, and there is no reason to expect otherwise.

But, it should look as good as a DVD, right? If so, what factors come into play?

What should I keep in mind when shooting for a 50" plasma with a DVX100B?

Thanks!
Click to expand...


My plasma is a little shy of the 50" (only 46") but my DV footage looks great on there.
Even my DVD byproduct from the DVD footage looks great.
Maybe it's your 50" isn't up to par? Or not properly adjusted?
 
try adjusting the resolution on your tv as well...set it to something closer to matching the sd footage
 
Your MPEG envoding software can make a huge difference! The Main Concept encoder included with Premiere is horrible. You can lose a ton of quality by using the wrong encoder or using it with the wrong settings. Properly shot, processed, and encoded progressive DVX footage should look pretty darn good on a 50" plasma.

One thing I haven't tried is upscaling to HD res and encoding a BluRay disc out of it. It has what 25mbps, so perhaps that would result in even better rendering to the screen?
 
PAL vs NTSC is interesting. For both systems doing SD to DVD, the PAL resut has 240% the chroma resolution and 120% the luma resolution of NTSC, so it looks a lot better.
 
I'm afraid you are mistaken. NTSC is 4:1:1 chroma (180x480) so half of its vertical chroma gets lost when converted to 4:2:0 DVD (a true 180x240 on a 360x240 NTSC DVD chroma). PAL chroma matches the dvd chroma sampling (both 4:2:0), so it's all there on the final DVD (360x288). 240%.
 
Otis Grapsas said:
I'm afraid you are mistaken. NTSC is 4:1:1 chroma (180x480) so half of its vertical chroma gets lost when converted to 4:2:0 DVD (a true 180x240 on a 360x240 NTSC DVD chroma). PAL chroma matches the dvd chroma sampling (both 4:2:0), so it's all there on the final DVD (360x288). 240%.
Click to expand...

Ah, I didn't know you were referring to the combined processes of DV chroma subsampling with additional MPEG color subsampling. Now it makes more sense.

However, many of us are doing deartifacting to recover lost chroma. Also, while MPEG and PAL both use the 4:2:0 notation, they use different cositing of the chroma samples. Therefore, chroma is resampled and some is lost in a PAL to MPEG encoding.

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

There are three variants of 4:2:0 schemes, having different horizontal and vertical siting. [4]

In MPEG-2, Cb and Cr are cosited horizontally. Cb and Cr are sited between pixels in the vertical direction (sited interstitially).
In 4:2:0 DV, Cb and Cr are cosited in the horizontal direction. In the vertical direction, they are cosited on alternating lines.
Click to expand...

All of this is kind of moot, though, since most of us are stuck in the "region" we're stuck in. :(
 
Even if you accept that a given PAL camera samples 4:2:0 differently than an mpeg DVD subsampler, the spatial different would be 0.5 to 1 pixel maximum. Resampling NTSC DV removes the hard edge between chroma areas (4x1 blocks) but does not increase the actual resolution. You still have 180 horizontal chroma lines. If you have a small red rose in the shot, the PAL algorithm gives you everything that DVD can represent so it can look great, one chroma sample for each 2x2 luma block but NTSC gives you a hard or soft 4pixel horizontal blur. There have been attempts to use the chroma samples that are thrown away, but the positional error is too many pixels, so that info is irrelevant to the luma (artifacts).

You can downsample high quality HD contest or an RGB test chart to PAL and NTSC DV and test for the particular editor/mpeg encoder by producing a DVD using your regular workflow. PAL just got lucky.
 
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Upres your footy. I have had some great results just using premier and exporting it as 720p with a decent bit rate and a small gop. If you then burn the 720p footage to a standard dvd and slap it in an up converting dvd player, it should look fantastic.

"Should" is the key word here haha.
 
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