Best HD footage to SD not for DVD but for editing?

[Harlockr]

Hi, I have been trying to achieve the best looking result from HD 1080 24p, to Mpeg2 720x480 29,97i , but the resulted video is just a shame for the EX footage. Mostly because of the low quality in the diagonal lines and strange artifacts.

I must deliver the material with those parameters, not for DVD, but for later editing with SD material. I can't send .avi in SD, or anything like that.. maybe just quicktimes instead of mpeg2. But i'm in PC world, with Premier CS4.

I tried ProCoder 3, TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress, MediaCoder, and of course the self Adobe Media Encoder. But the results are just not that great.

Is there anything i'm doing wrong? Do I have to make some kind of pulldown first before start editing? Should I first scale down, and then interlace the footage?

Any expert advice is really appreciated!

I'm attaching an example of what i'm talking about. They are just screenshots, so don't pay attention to the colors, but check the lines.

 

[Al MacLeod]

The solution I use involves a couple of freeware apps. I couldnt understand why my $600 Premiere CS3 win did such a poor job of HD to SD.

After a lot of Google searching I found Lagarith codec...a lossless avi codec you install on your system, Virtualdub for processing avi files, Avisynth, a scripting app you install on your system and Hcenc, an avi to mpeg app.

Output your Premiere timeline as movie, Microsoft avi, Lagarith codec. (remember to interpret footage)

Open the Lagarith avi in Virtualdub and use the resize video filter, uncheck the aspect ratio box and set to 720 by 480.

While the resize is running open a second Vitualdub session and open the same Lagarith avi and output as a wav file.

Avisynth hands off the avi file in the format Hcenc wants...a script. The docs that are available after you install Avisynth walk you through writing it. The first paragraph tells you all you need to know. It sounds harder than it is.

Open the avs file (the script file from Avisysnth) in Hcenc.
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/hc_encoder_settings.cfm gives a lot of info on Hcenc parameters.

After Hcenc is done you have a file sans sound that you will join with the wav file from Virtual dub.

Post how it works for you...a lot of people are asking the same questions.

 

[Harlockr]

Wow, sounds like a complex workflow for rushes, but i'd give it a try and post back.
Thanks for the info! I still don't get it, why there isn't a simple way to convert HD to SD with good quality?
My old footage from a DVX100, made better SD videos than the EX3, and that's just not right =/
I'm sure i'm doing something wrong, because with Mediacoder it almost worked. But it has so many bugs that is not reliable and too many things could go wrong.

 

[Jordan_S]

What happens when you don't change the frame rate?

 

[Al MacLeod]

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=137018

This thread covers a lot of stuff...frame size is one of them. It seems the most damage is done during the resize. Virtualdub does a really good job resizing. I use lancos3 for resizing by the way. It may look complicated, but once you do it a few times it's easy.

As far as frame rates go, have not had to do that, don't know.

 

[Demistate]

CS3 has a terrible scaler, and color space converter, this means going from HD Rec.709, to SD, Rec.601 introduces all of these artifacts you're describing (jagged, or aliased pixels, incorrect colors).

Unfortunately there is no "easy" software solution that exists for doing these conversions. Because there are so many factors in changing one video format to another, the mere fact that adobe has attempted to make the conversion easy results in bad down-converts. You have no control over what color space to convert to, you have no control over the down-sampling method to use, and you have no control over the matrix settings in the Mpeg-2 encoder.

You just need to tell your client that the "rushes" or "dailys" will be draft quality, and that the final render will always look superb. After that, hire a professional encoder to create your final master media, or spend lots of time and money obtaining and learning how to use the tools to create final, high-quality masters.

As far as I know, AviSynth is the only compression software that I know of that allows you to control the scaling method of video files. I have not seen it in Sorenson Squeeze or any of the Adobe products.

Down-sampling in Adobe CS4 is still not as sharp as it should be, though it is improved over CS3.

Spline36 is my favorite re-sampling method as it does not over sharpen the footage, and introduces no artifacts (even though the encoding speed is much slower than lancos operations)