Anyone making BluRay w/ XHA1?

L

lcheadle

Member
I've been delivering some XHA1 event videos on BluRay. Looking for other folks doing the same to share experiences. After all is rendered and burned I think I prefer standard definition. This particular company uses 6db gain for indoors. It looks great when you downconvert from HDV to SD on capture but when doing it native HDV to BluRay I think the gain grain gets exasperated. Or maybe that's just the nature of BluRay... super fine grain. I was in Blockbuster watching the BluRay demo and the trailer/behind the scenes piece was cutting between movie clips and interviews. The movie clips looked spectacular but the interviews looked just like my XHA1 footage...super fine grainy! Maybe the used the same camera for the interviews.
So the theory I'm coming up with is that all HD is NOT created equal and that the Canon XHA1 gives low end HD results no matter what. Anyone? Any thoughts?
 
I haven't burned XH-A1 HD to blueray but I have burned it to DVD in HD and played back on a PS3 and the results were phenomenal. I think it must have been due to the gain in your case. To get good clean indoor footage you need to have decent light. Was anything done in post to try to "lighten" up the footage? I know from experience that can really make the grain stand out. I think in SD the grain would have been the same....only less detailed!:)

Not sure if you're aware but you should always switch the AGC switch on the body of the camera to off. There are a few other ways to get better results in lowlight rather than using gain. There is a lowlight preset in the presets thread here which works well. Also one thing I do sometimes is shoot 24f because the default shutter speed is 48 as opposed to 60 in the other framerates. Lastly you could also try lowering your shutter just one more notch, not too much though or you get noticable motion blur.
 
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So far I've only burned one A1 project to blu-ray and didn't have the grain issue. I agree with Edwin that the high gain is likely the culprit.

I am curious as to which software application you are using to create the blu-ray disk. the ones that require you to provide elemental video and audio files tend to deliver better results than those that just let you use a audio/video program file.
 
Thanks for the responses!

Atwinator-
AGC has always been off and shutter speed at 30, no post filters.

Mvansomeren-
Here's my workflow... edit HDV native in Final Cut, export ProRes, import into Sony DVD Architect Pro (Vegas) for authoring & compression using AVC H.264 default bit rates & create .iso, burn using Toast. ProRes is the only format Sony accepts from FCP. Not crazy about that because of the monster file size. Also, I tried exporting from FCP through Compessor using Apple's BluRay settings, but when I brought that mpeg2 file into DVD Architect Pro, DVD Architect re-compressed the file. Not cool.

I experimented using Toast's encoding features. I imported ProRes, DVCPRO HD & HDV versions of the same HDV clip from Final Cut and the results all looked the same. This leads me to believe that it's the camera and it's settings.
 
Gain = Grain. What did you expect to happen?

Keep gain set to 0 or -3 and you won't have this problem. I do understand that with event shooting, lighting is usually a disaster. I've started shooting events with a PD170 instead of my A1 because the low light is so much better. Obviously it's not HD, but I've found that most people couldn't care less.
 
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