S-Video beats Firewire??

A

Arthur Hancock

New member
Hello.

I shoot with the DVX100A, edit in Final Cut Pro (G5), and make a very nice master on DVCAM (Sony DSR-11). When I burn a DVD copy (firewire from the DSR-11 to a standalone Sony DVD recorder--the RDRGX-7--the result is a significant loss of blacks: everything looks slightly faded and washed out.

However when I go S-Video from the DSR-11 to the DVD recorder I get the black back and a much more viewable picture.

Can anyone tell me what's going on? I don't use DVD Studio Pro because I get a cleaner transfer/less artifacts going straight to a standalone DVD recorder.

Thanks! I just joined and have enjoyed this forum for some time.

Arthur
 
Arthur Hancock said:
Can anyone tell me what's going on? I don't use DVD Studio Pro because I get a cleaner transfer/less artifacts going straight to a standalone DVD recorder.
Click to expand...

If that is the case, I suspect your compressor settings aren't optimised. In order to use your suggested path through S-video, this happens:

• Original Footage re-compressed back to DV after colour correction - 5:1 compression - visible loss of detail.
• This digital DV signal is decoded to an analogue S-video signal by DSR-11 - Further loss.
• Now as an analogue signal, there will be contined loss through the cabling and hardware into the Sony DVD-burner's MPEG2 encoder.
• The MPEG 2 compression here will then cause further degradation and have very limited settings. It will also definitely be single pass encoding too.

However, if you encode straight from FCP using Compressor, the path is:

• Original footage, sampled and filtered straight into Compressor to produce the MPEG2 file.

The compression can also be VBR (variable bitrate), 2-pass and use very high bitrates.... too high for many players if you fancy!

Therefore, I would try and get things working that way, because the results should be very, very clean.


Referring to your problem in hand: Maybe the DVD-burner is converting the DV signal to anologue before encoding...(?) If that was the case, the DSR-11 would probably have a better D/A converter in it and do a better job. If the Sony DVD does encode straight from the DV signal, then I would guess its encoding software or hardware isn't optimised for the DV signal. Most people use these consumer recorders to record from analogue TV, so that may be where Sony spent the alotted R&D budget.

...just guesses though. However, I strongly recommend trying Compressor and FCP again. The results I get are near perfect - No problems with artifacts etc.

Hope that helps :thumbsup:
 
Great answer. I would have thought sticking in the digital realm would have yeilded the best possible results as well.

Out of curiosity, from looking at your avatar, just what were you trying to get when you held up that kitten?
 
Thanks for the input!

My wife and I have produced nature videos of the mountains of western North Carolina (unnarrated, nature sounds mixed with acoustic piano) for the past eight years. When we got ready to leave VHS (all gods be praised!) and go to DVD, we had our DVCPRO masters "authored" THREE TIMES on expensive machines...and were thoroughly disappointed with the results (loss of detail, pixel-city in leafage, etc.)! We were willing to pay large bucks to have mirror images of our master tapes, which were created thusly:

We uploaded our DV tapes (DSR VX1000) to the DPS Perception recorder via component analogue from our Panasonic AJ D-650 DVCPRO deck, edited in Speed Razor, and downloaded analogue component to a DVCPRO master tape in the 650.

To our complete amazement, we wound up mastering our own DVDs by going S-Video out of the 650 into our six hundred dollar consumer Sony RDRGX7 DVD recorder to get the results we wanted!! We had to live with a tacky Sony menu page but the footage looked great compared to the junky masters the service bureaus had given us.

Maybe our Compressor is set up wrong. We did try it when we first got our G5 and were not happy with the results--in fact they mirrored what we saw in our "authored" masters.

We've isolated this "black-destroying" problem (firewire-wise) to the input on the Sony burner. Could it be that the 7.5 IRE is being somehow doubled at the input?

By the way your kitten hold-up shot is terrific.
 
If you have DV tapes then you should just keep it digital the full way through. As it is you converted from digital to analog to digital on capture and then went from digital to analog and then back to digital when it was put back on to tape. You're probably used to the way you worked on analog tapes. You could also consider dumping directing from your editing system to a DVD rather than going through a master tape and then back.

As a starting point with Compressor choose the best quality settings for the time alloted (i.e. 60 min highest quality setting if it's 60 minutes or less) There's a lot of different options. If you need to make a long dvd consider compressing audio with the a.pack so you have more room/bandwidth for video.
 
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