grahamwilloughby
New member
How do I minimize the pixellation on edges of contrasty items like a tomato or whatever. Is this a result of low light? Too much light? This happens even when the image is not gained up. See attachment please.
Image Quality
- Thread starter grahamwilloughby
- Start date
ryan brown
lOwEr CaSe Member
What mode are you shooting in?
grahamwilloughby
New member
24pa.
Joshua Provost
Veteran
Graham,
First, cool picture, a nice little still life setup. Brings me back to my days in art class.
Second, I haven't seen a PICT file in a long, long time. Brings me back to my days using Macs.
Enough of this reminiscence, though.
What you are seeing is the called color/chroma subsampling, and it's one of the ways miniDV squeezes all of the image onto those little tapes. It splits the image into luminance (brightness) and chrominance (color) and then it throws away 3 out of 4 of the color samples. The result is the blockiness you see.
In NTSC DV, the blocks are 1x4 horizontal rectangles. Later, if you encode to DVD, this color subsampling will happen once again, but using 2x2 square blocks of color. This double color subsampling in different ways is a very bad thing, but it's part of the DV game.
Even normal broadcast over-the-air TV is subsampled, just not as much, it throws away half of the color information instead of 3/4. You usually only see this stuff on your computer monitor while editing. Try it out, burn a DVD of your footage and play it back on your TV. You probably won't see the subsampling because TV's are sufficiently blurry enough to wash it out.
If you want to get serious and fight the subsampling there are a couple ways to do so, but it depends on what tools you have. Magic Bullet Suite had a Deartifacting feature that could be used to rebuild the color channels. Many NLE's have Chroma Smoother filters to blur the color channels and reduce the appearance of blockiness. The DV Rebel's Guide suggests a Median filter set to 2 or 3 applied only as a color overlay, but you need After Effects to do it (I use this method and like it a lot).
If you do all of that, you only get the benefits if you save in a format with high enough fideilty to preserve the addtiional detail you have recovered, so you need to use an uncompressed (QT with None compression) or other lossless 4:4:4 format. Once you go to DVD, you get inflicted with subsampling again, but there is a case to be made for keeping a 4:4:4 digital master around for future applications, and there may be some benefit to restoring miniDV chroma prior to doing DVD compression, it might look a little better than if you didn't.
Josh
First, cool picture, a nice little still life setup. Brings me back to my days in art class.
Second, I haven't seen a PICT file in a long, long time. Brings me back to my days using Macs.
Enough of this reminiscence, though.
What you are seeing is the called color/chroma subsampling, and it's one of the ways miniDV squeezes all of the image onto those little tapes. It splits the image into luminance (brightness) and chrominance (color) and then it throws away 3 out of 4 of the color samples. The result is the blockiness you see.
In NTSC DV, the blocks are 1x4 horizontal rectangles. Later, if you encode to DVD, this color subsampling will happen once again, but using 2x2 square blocks of color. This double color subsampling in different ways is a very bad thing, but it's part of the DV game.
Even normal broadcast over-the-air TV is subsampled, just not as much, it throws away half of the color information instead of 3/4. You usually only see this stuff on your computer monitor while editing. Try it out, burn a DVD of your footage and play it back on your TV. You probably won't see the subsampling because TV's are sufficiently blurry enough to wash it out.
If you want to get serious and fight the subsampling there are a couple ways to do so, but it depends on what tools you have. Magic Bullet Suite had a Deartifacting feature that could be used to rebuild the color channels. Many NLE's have Chroma Smoother filters to blur the color channels and reduce the appearance of blockiness. The DV Rebel's Guide suggests a Median filter set to 2 or 3 applied only as a color overlay, but you need After Effects to do it (I use this method and like it a lot).
If you do all of that, you only get the benefits if you save in a format with high enough fideilty to preserve the addtiional detail you have recovered, so you need to use an uncompressed (QT with None compression) or other lossless 4:4:4 format. Once you go to DVD, you get inflicted with subsampling again, but there is a case to be made for keeping a 4:4:4 digital master around for future applications, and there may be some benefit to restoring miniDV chroma prior to doing DVD compression, it might look a little better than if you didn't.
Josh
grahamwilloughby
New member
Woah, thanks. I figured it was just a result of the standard definition of the camera, but I have been watching my dvd's on a 42" flat screen from 2 feet away and it's kind of brutal.
Nothing worked better for me than the Natress plugin G chroma smooth.