Anamorphic squeeze quality

BEENYWEENIES

BEENYWEENIES

Active member
Hi everyone, haven't posted in a long time (luckily I've been too busy working), so it's good to be back!

I recently finished a short project with the dvx, and naturally on-set (and an hour before rolling tape), the client casually informed us that the final product would now be displayed on a widescreen tv even though we had finalized those details as 4:3 a week prior. Panicked, we had no choice but to use the anamorphic squeeze option as the subject was rather large vertically etc.

Long story short, what we ended up with was more grainy than I have ever seen from the DVX, and not just subtle (i.e. desirable) film-like grain but more like patchy or chunky grain and artifacting. On MCUs or further from camera, this chunky grain ate away precious detail on our subjects pretty badly, whereas closeups looked a touch grainy but fine. Also, focus seemed to be soft on these longer shots, no matter what we did.

So in the interest of averting this in the future, my question is - what quality hits are known and expected from the widescreen squeeze setting? Part 2 of that question - is uprezing a letterboxed shot to full frame 16:9 less damaging than squeeze mode? We shot in standard 29.97 with no funky filters or anything, and had enough light that we were stopping down a notch or two on every setup, so I have a hard time believing the grain issue is from lack of light.

Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated!!!
 
Squeeze + interlaced = ugly. That was the mistake there. Squeeze+24p or Squeeze+30p can be very, very good -- as detailed as any native 16:9 interlaced 1/3" camera. But squeeze+interlaced is not nearly as good.

If you have to shoot squeeze, see if there's any way you can shoot progressive/thin. If you have to shoot interlaced, well... squeeze isn't the best choice. You could probably do better to execute the 16:9 conversion in post somehow.
 
Thanks for the reply, Barry. When the client alerted us to this new 16:9 requirement on-set, we did a quick huddle to discuss our options and 24p did come up. We decided against it because we were a bit cautious about changing our shooting and post plans so dramatically on the fly, as the widescreen requirement changed things quite enough on its own. Wish we hadn't, but given that we had one measly week for post on four :30 spots we probably were smart to avoid such a dramatic last minute shakeup in our plans.

Either way, thanks again, it's good to know for future situations, and ultimately we are going to do a full set of new tests to evaluate all of this, just wanted to get some input here first!
 
If you evaluate the widescreen possibilities with your cam, I would advise to also test letterbox modes (interlaced/progressive, thin, thick), and let the widescreen display do the rescaling(uprez). Modern widescreen sets use powerfull deinterlacers, which make the signal progressive anyway (needed for flatscreen displaying). The progressive data is then being rescaled straight to the correct vertical resolution (like 768 horizontal lines in my 37' display) and not to the intermediate 525 lines which outputs your cam, thus avoiding double rescaling .
The advantage with letterbox is that it is OK on a 4:3 TV too.
 
I'll definitely look into that, thanks for the input.

To save others the hassle maybe I'll post a series of screenshots for each mode and setting here, so they can evaluate the results as well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top