MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

So maybe the answer is that there's a very good looking analog downres going on when I view the NTSC output of the FX1, but there's no good way I'll be able to make that happen in a computer.

Like I said, hopefully I'll be able to make it happen soon and compare to the DVX.

Office moves suck.
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Barry I agree. I USED to think that starting with a higher resolution image would make for a better down converted image but it doesnt always. Heres why I USED to believed that and perhaps why many others do as well:

1)If we are talking about a digital captured image (video camera) then they reason why CineAlta footage looks better than DVX footage after the down convert is because of many factors but by far the largest is the quality of that CCD and what ratio it compresses the image by. 4:4:4, 4:2:2, etc. We can see the huge difference by looking at uncompressed frame grabs out of a DVX via the www.Reel-Stream.com system. When uncompressed our CCD deliver images that are still SD but have a incredibly larger latitude range than before and you know thoughs jagged edges on high contrast shapes that we hate....GONE. The improvement is so dramatic you would think that your arent working with merely SD images anymore when in fact they still are...just in their pure/highest quality form.

Basically my point is COMPRESSION is the main reason why we notice a increase in quality with these 100,000 HD cameras over our SD DVX cameras AFTER WE VIEW THE FOOTAGE ON DVD.

2)A SIMILAR but analog version of this point can be seen when we look at the superior format of 35mm after its been telecined. Most of that great latitude and res you get from 35mm survives the down res process to SD DVD. Also film is just physically different than digitally captured images when it comes to resolution. To prove this take 16mm. I think we can all agree that its higher resolution than what a SD DVD can provide. So if its better than DVD resolution then the first thought is that there is no advantage to shooting 35mm then if you just wanted to make a DVD in the end. One would think yes. But if you have ever seen 35mm and 16mm telecined you will noticed that the 16mm footage is softer than the 35mm even though both are much high res than the DVD.

Film res cant be directly compared to digital res. "Apples and oranges".

Damn I said all of this stuff in the post that started this thread. Someone throw me a frickin' bone here. ;)
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

[quote author=Brett_Erskine link=board=sony;num=1103104690;start=75#81 date=12/18/04 at 14:28:48]

Film res cant be directly compared to digital res. "Apples and oranges".
[/quote]

I disagree, especially when film is transferred to video on a telecine.

Having worked with film for years, I can CLEARLY see the difference between 16mm and 35mm telecine xfers. It's never guesswork for a film DP to identify which format was used.

In the end, getting the FX1 stuff to downconvert and hold the extra res may be more than it's worth with the tools we all have.

My 10+ years of film experience knows that the FX1 CAN look better than what we've seen...
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

But film to video is a very different process, entirely and completely different than digitally downrezzing an existing digital source.

If you take the example of the old rank telecine, it was effectively a video camera, shooting an image of the reality that was presented to it, which is a 35mm film frame.  So the camera/CCD in the telecine was scanning/shooting an image that was pristine and clear, and so it did the best job it could with it.

To further complicate matters, the quality of SD you get from your film footage depends on how you transfer it.  A Spirit or a Millennium will do a lot better job than an old Rank will.  I've got Rank'd 16mm film footage shot at the same time and the same place as DVX footage, and the DVX looks "as good" or perhaps even "better", as relates to sharpness and clarity.  That may not have been the case had I had it transferred on a Millennium.  Which is the same argument as before: the SDX is comparable to the Millennium whereas the DVX would be the rough equivalent of the Rank, so obviously the SD image from the SDX will look better, just like the film transferred from the Millennium would look better.

Now, the test that would make this analagous to what we're exploring here would be: can you telecine film to SD resolution, and then telecine that same film on that same system at HD resolution, and then after you downrez that HD image to SD, will it look better on DVD than the SD telecine footage?  I suspect that it won't.  
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Nate Weaver-
Take another look at my post and you'll see that we actually agree with each other. You simply misread my post. I was indeed saying that you can tell the difference between 16mm and 35mm when telecined and finally put to DVD. In fact here. This is my quote you should have responded to:

"But if you have ever seen 35mm and 16mm telecined you will noticed that the 16mm footage is softer than the 35mm even though both are much high(er) res than the DVD."

Besides this isnt a issue about film. That was only used as one extreme example to better explain one of my points.

The effect of compression on this issue is what I was trying to throw around. I'd like to hear what people think of this issue. Do you agree or disagree?
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

I was just wondering, and after reading some of these posts it has hit me that Barry has used Vegas (and he also mentioned that he let the FX1 do the hdv to DV on the fly) but anyhow, i do remember that when the JVC HD10 came out and Barry had done some side by side testing and upressed some DVX footage which did not hold up too well, however Barry then upressed it again (DVX) using S-spline pro (i think) and it did a much better job.

Beacsue of this i was wondering if maybe Vegas is not the best scaler/resampler to use?

I'm in no way saying Barry's test are wrong, but.. from what i've seen (CF25 s-video to my SD PAL TV it was very good, {now i would love to have some raw dvx DV files and run the same test for my self})
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

I don't believe that Vegas is the be-all, end-all as far as scaling goes.  It is much better than Premiere 6.0, and it appears to do a better job than FCP (from what I have heard but not experienced) and it appears to do a better job than the camera itself does.  It seems to do a job pretty comparable to PhotoShop.

Yes, I found up-rezzing (which is a whole different story, by the way) in Vegas wasn't nearly as competitive as up-rezzing in S-Spline Pro.  (I also tried to up-rez DVX footage to 1440x1080 to compare against FX1, and so far the results have been not competitive).  S-Spline is designed to offer the best up-rezzing, and it does a great job, better than Vegas does.  For downrezzing, I don't know... again, I chose Vegas for the reasons listed above, including a) I had it, and b) Spot says it does wonders.  And it does appear to do almost as good as dedicated PhotoShop, which is saying something.

Next time I get ahold of an FX1 I'll re-capture some tiny clips and post the .m2t files so you guys can play with the same raw footage I've been working with, and see if you can deliver different results.
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD qualit

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD qualit

Barry,

I agree with your instinct that downrezing HD footage will result in lower quality footage than SD footage given the same camera quality, but I think there might be a slight error in your Photoshop experiment. After downrezing the first HD checkerboard frame, you got an SD checkerboard frame that you "zoomed in on" to determine if the downrez was soft or not. If the image was really a pixel-by-pixel checkerboard, though, you wouldn't be able to zoom in, and the downrez wouldn't have those thin lines of gray around the squares because the whole square would consist of just one pixel. Or am I missing something?

BTW, I bought a 42" Panasonic plasma EDTV two years ago after a reviewer I respect said that DVDs looked better on Panasonic's EDTV (which has 480 horizontal lines - exactly the same as DVDs) than they did on Panasonic's HDTV (with 720 lines).
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

I just remembered something, i read some where that when donrezing HD to SD indeed you do get slight softing, however i think their remedy was to apply a slight softing filter to the HD video first before the downrez that apparently kept the sharpness.. apparently all the pro harware have all these filters built in.

Another trick is step resizing, donrez in 10% increments untill you get to your target rez, its an old photograhic (digital image) trick (so i've been told).
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

I dunno know about you guys but of all of Barry's side-by-side comparisons of the different cameras, I actually like the picture quality of the downrezzed FX1 footage. It looks more filmic than the others, although I know you will argue that the DVX100 and XL2 have 24P. True. But a fairer test would be comparing it to the PAL FX1 either de-interlacing the 50i or shooting CF25.

Back to the picture quality. If you ever step through a Hollywood DVD, you will notice the DVD picture, while cleaner, the edges also appear soft, yet somehow it still appears sharp. While the DVX and XL2 appear sharper than the FX1 footage, remember that downrezzing from HD to SD, you will naturally get a softer image, since any pre-filtering done in camera gets reduced once downrezzed. For instance, sharpening halos get reduced to 50%, noise and edge artifacts also get reduced, so while fx1 footage looks softer, it actually will look better than straight out of the cam SD footage.

The one thing I noticed about the DVX and XL2 footage, is that they appear sharpened, even if the settings were in the middle or turned-off, the image appears decidedly still very video-ish.

And regarding the low light capabilities of the cameras, the DVX is pretty noisy and its default settings may even have built-in gain, which I must surmise when looking at how damn noisy the picture is. A better comparison would be to shoot a low light scene so they appear similar on all the cameras, even if it means you need to shoot with gain-up on the FX1 to arrive at the same brightness level. Compare the final images and check for noise, sharpness and detail. What would it matter if the FX1 was using F1.6 with +12dB gain and the images came out sharp and noise-free than if the DVX100's image came out to the same brightness at f4.0 / No gain, but was riddled with noise?

Again, keeping what I said in mind, looking at the pictures, it's pretty clear to me the quality of the downrezzed FX1 looks a whole lot better than either DVX100 or XL2.
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

But Barry,

I think your illustration for the HD CCD SD acquisition is incorrect.

For a typical 720:

WBWB
BWBW
WBWB

For HD, it shouldn't be:

WWBBWWBB
BBWWBBWW
WWBBWWBB
BBWWBBWW

But instead, it should be:

WBWBWBWB
BWBWBWBW
WBWBWBWB
BWBWBWBW

W = White Pixel
B = Black Pixel

I think, which this, it'll yield different result under photoshop.

Sorry, and correct me if I'm wrong.
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Well, no, I'm thinking that if you were imaging a checkerboard that was of such detail that the DV camera would get exactly one pixel per block, then the HD camera (which packs twice as many pixels on to each line, and twice as many lines into each frame) should render each black pixel as a block of four black pixels, and each white pixel as a block of four white pixels. The white and black squares on the checkerboard are the same physical size, but the HD camera has 4x as much resolution so it would render each block using 4 pixels.

Does that make sense?
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

I have a DVX100a, never seen our touched a FX1 or XL2.  That said...

In the first example (60i at the terminal) the Sony is too underexposed to be fair.  It should have some gain added.  The DVX exibits a high level of grain especially in the womans black coat.  The other two are far less grainy.  Winner in IMAGE QUALITY- Cannon (or possibly sony if gain was increased.)

In the second example (ice skating rink) the framing is too far off to be able to tell anything constructive here but I notice that the sony and DVX are very similar in color in these cinegamma settings and the Cannon's setting is much less attractive.  The Sony seems to have better contrast than the others and the blacks are not crushed but I would describe them as rich.  In this comparison we can only compare color becuase of the framing problems and I like the gamma settings of the DVX and Sony.

In the third example which to me is the kicker the Sony and Canon are simply on another page than the DVX.  The shadow in the tunnel on the DVX image is so grainy.  The sony shows again the rich color comparable to the DVX and the canon's color is not as attractive.  Again framing on each camera is slightly different with different levels of zoom.  I give the clear edge in this third comparison to the Canon and Sony with the edge to Sony overall for the nice color similar to the DVX.

Sorry my take is different than everyone else but I can assure you that it's not biased since if anything I would like to lean toward the DVX since I have it.

The next thing to compare are video clips so we can see these cameras move the frames to get the real test.

-Jonathan

P.S. If we're going to compare frame grabs the frames must be identical with the same shot and level of zoom or else it's a throw away.  The other thing is that if we are testing image clarity we should have no moving parts in the picture like leaves, people, etc... distant letters, tree trunks and buildings are good.
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

It looks to me like if you're going to use the DVX you better have proper lighting.  Has anyone found a way to remove the grain like we can do in digital photo images?  I see that as the biggest problem with the DVX not resolution, though it does appear to have slightly less resolution than the others based on the letters at the train terminal.
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Barry,

Outdoors, the XL2 definitely seems to produce a more pleasing picture ( to my eye at least ). Is there anything that could be tweaked in camera on the DVX to improve the color? On the XL2, the grass is greener, the fall foliage doesn't look so red. To my eye ( that of an aspiring Nature Videographer ), the aesthetics of the XL2 are better ...
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

oh, gosh have we opened a can of video worms here!,

lets just say they are all great video producing cams, with excellent tweakability.. and in the end the camera that is best for you is the one looks good to you (they are all about the same-ish)

DVX's stick with what you have if you staying SD
XL2'ers stick with what you have if your staying SD
FX1's stick with what you have, SD is good enough, and you have the HD option when it becomes viable(if not already)

Of course no two people will always percieve the same thing the same way.
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Oh, you can do just about anything you want to the color in the DVX, or any of these cameras really. There are so many options for color and contrast and detail in the DVX that you could write a book about 'em. The XL2 has almost as many options; the FX1 has the least, but still a tremendous amount.

You shouldn't judge any of these pictures on color or contrast simply because you can make the color look like anything you want it to. In the DVX I was able to simulate a dozen Magic Bullet looks IN-CAMERA; that's how extensive the image controls are.
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Totally, awesome ... Is it safe to assume you covered this in the DVX book? Damn, I still need to order tha bugga ...

Thanks !!
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

The book covers all the menu settings, and the DVD shows them in action and what they do. And there's also a section on the DVD that demonstrates them emulating/simulating the Magic Bullet looks.
 
Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Re: MPEG2 HD v.s.  DV SD and Final DVD quality

Thanks Barry,

Apologies for my Silly/Uninformed "NewBie" statements and questions ;D I will get my Money Order in the mail to you tomorrow.
 
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