AC130: Workflow - 1080p/24 to (SD) Standard Definition

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deedub5090

Member
Ok guys i'm a NEWB on the forum. Just started a videography business. Not using it to make money.... Just enjoy videography. Purchased a panny AC130 my first prosumer cam. I can say this it's an amazing camera. I have learned a ton from Barry's book and Noah's video thanks guys. I booked my first wedding... Well basically did it for free considering how much time i have put in and how much i was paid.
Anyway, I learned a few things.

1) The AC130 is great in low light. My second camera a dslr is ok and my stionary camera is horrible. I plan on buying a second 130 when the price comes down. I used Barry's scene files and set the 130 to 100% manual. SCARY FOR ME. The only problem I had was that I underexposed the shoot a little. The DSLR was fine (Wife had it set to auto) Will try to fix it in post.


2) When shooting HD stabalize... stabalize.... stabalize. My shots turned out great albeit the angles were not great. I shot from a tripod for most of the ceremony and reception popped of the tripod for some run in gun when appropriate. Second camera used a monopod for another angle. (In hindsight should have used the second camera for crowd cutaways and used the 130 in a more central location) but anyway for sure use stabilization whenever possible.


3) White balance is critical. I white balanced the cam just prior to the shoot but unexpectedly they changed the freakin lighting from white to blue on their fancy led lighting system... Not sure why but it added a green hue to my entire shoot. I'm sure someone will no exactly why that happened and how i could have handled that on the fly but.... that's water under the bridge at this point. The second camera (DSLR) was fine again wife had it set to auto. Not really a problem. In post (Premiere CS5.5) I used RGB Curves to pull out the green and the two camera's were close to being exact.

4) Used manual focus without to much fuss for the stationary shots to avoid the autofocus issue. Switched to autofucus for the run-and-gun... Well actually it was more like walk-and-shoot and didn't notice any real issues with the footage. I did however not really change focus points much just moved around a little. No quick pans that would require the cam to have to work to hard. As far as I can tell it turned out fine.

Now here comes my questions for the experts on here. After tediously editing and color correcting it's almost time to start authoring discs. The client doesn't have a bluray player. I knew this when I started but still took the advice of Noah and others to shoot 1080p/24.

I want to put out the best quality DVD. I have heard that you can get artifacts in your video when you downsize. I'm looking for someone who has some experience giving me some pointers on how to accomplish the downsize with the best possible results given my current footage and framerate. What's the workflow? Is AME sufficient or do i need to use a third party solution? I used the meters yet still underexposed. Chris or someone with some experience with the camera chime in please. Should I have used autoiris?

Nonetheless, I had a ton of fun doing this... It's addictive. I plan on doing some more to build a slamming portfolio and then going actually charging people what i'm worth. Anyway, thank you in advance for your reponses.
 
The best way to go is to do it as a two-step process:

Step One export from 1080/24p to 16:9 standard definition 720x480 24p. I generally recommend the codec to be ProRes HQ or Uncompressed. This gives you a pristine looking SD master.

Step 2- use that master as your source for MPEG2 encoding to 16:9/24p. That should give you the best possible SD output. What looks terrible is going directly from 1080/24p to DVD as that throws away a ton of information as the encoding is trying to calculate the downconversion and the MPEG2 transcode in a single step.

-Noah
 
NoahK said:
The best way to go is to do it as a two-step process:

Step One export from 1080/24p to 16:9 standard definition 720x480 24p. I generally recommend the codec to be ProRes HQ or Uncompressed. This gives you a pristine looking SD master.

Step 2- use that master as your source for MPEG2 encoding to 16:9/24p. That should give you the best possible SD output. What looks terrible is going directly from 1080/24p to DVD as that throws away a ton of information as the encoding is trying to calculate the downconversion and the MPEG2 transcode in a single step.

-Noah
Click to expand...

I never knew this. So if I shot 1080 @60i then the same formatting will help the quality. I had to make a custom preset to get the settings you have above or is there a preset that I missed?

Thanks
Robert
 
Completed a DVD and tried changing it. Works well kept the image cleaner around the edges. I made a preset in compressor now so I can just drop it. I will be doing this for every DVD as it just looks better. Thanks.
 
NoahK said:
What looks terrible is going directly from 1080/24p to DVD as that throws away a ton of information as the encoding is trying to calculate the downconversion and the MPEG2 transcode in a single step.
Click to expand...

That might well apply to other software, but not to the Adobe suite. Premiere Pro (and AME) will perform the export as two distinct steps. The first is to render the new frame, including any necessary scaling. And if you have hardware acceleration, or if you don't have that but check Maximum Render Quality, the scaling is actually quite good.

The second and discrete step it to transcode to MPEG2.

So, the easiest way is to simply export the original sequence using an MPEG2-DVD preset. That should yield very good results.
 
I will try both methods and see if i observe an appreciable difference. The bluray test copy turned out great but showed me some spots that i need to address (little camara stabilization issues). Using warp stabilizar to fix them. I am also adjusting my cut points... I absolutely had way to many so i am going to cut those by about 50 percent. Its a wedding not a horror show. One final question should i use h.264 or mpeg2 for my dvd. It is my understanding that h.264 is able to attain the same quality and use less space. It really isnt too much of an issue as the dvd should come in around 90 minutes but I am curious.
 
As far as I know a DVD can only accept MPEG files or should I say a type of MPEG program stream. They are a VOB file and others this is how the DVD player decodes the information. You can put a h.264 file direct to BlueRay I think but not a Standard DVD. Unless you are talking about letting your DVD software transcode it, then I would use a uncompressed version of your final product and let it encode it automatically (uncompressed will offer the highest quality without any artifacts). I prefer to encode it myself and tweak settings to make some footage better and other footage that do-sent need to look as great smaller file size so I can fit my project into 1 DVD either -5 or -9.
 
rzr219 said:
As far as I know a DVD can only accept MPEG files or should I say a type of MPEG program stream. They are a VOB file and others this is how the DVD player decodes the information. You can put a h.264 file direct to BlueRay I think but not a Standard DVD. Unless you are talking about letting your DVD software transcode it, then I would use a uncompressed version of your final product and let it encode it automatically (uncompressed will offer the highest quality without any artifacts). I prefer to encode it myself and tweak settings to make some footage better and other footage that do-sent need to look as great smaller file size so I can fit my project into 1 DVD either -5 or -9.
Click to expand...
Ok... Makes things infinately simplier when there are less choices.



I am encoding right now. Tell you what the results are. I first tried to just ship it over from premiere cs6 to encore via dynamic link.... Was shocked that it actually worked but not happy with what i was seeing. The original automatic setting for a 4.7 dvd showed the file size to be 2.7 gb. That scared me. Don't want to waste two hours + encoding to get a garbage result. The bluray file looked really nice and to go to 2.6 gb scared me so..... Took everyones advice and exported uncompressed to 16:9 24p. Will then import to encore. Don't like that encore chooses either low 4mbs or high 8mbs. Just feel like if I have a 4.7gb disc space encore should maximize the amount of space available to give me the best quality (fill the disc already).

Someone with nohow tell me how i am wrong related to the unused disc space.
 
Wish I could help you, but I don't use Adobe. There must be a way to set the bit rate min and max. Don't go over 8 (older players don't like that) try to stay around 7.2 or so max and 2 Pass at VBR. To encode to MPEG should only take 20-30 minutes for a 2 hour DVD (or on my older Mac that what it takes sorta of). Don't put it on a disc, build a file on your hard drive and open it with your dvd player to see how it will turn out before you waste a disc. Hope this helps.
 
NoahK said:
The best way to go is to do it as a two-step process:

Step One export from 1080/24p to 16:9 standard definition 720x480 24p. I generally recommend the codec to be ProRes HQ or Uncompressed. This gives you a pristine looking SD master.

Step 2- use that master as your source for MPEG2 encoding to 16:9/24p. That should give you the best possible SD output. What looks terrible is going directly from 1080/24p to DVD as that throws away a ton of information as the encoding is trying to calculate the downconversion and the MPEG2 transcode in a single step.

-Noah
Click to expand...

Ok here are the results. I tried both versions.

TEST 1

I edited the 1080p/24fps footage in a sequence in premiere. I then exported the footage to 720x480 24p widescreen uncompressed (Think this was the error don't have ProRes HQ). This resulted in a 100gb file. I then imported that file into encore and encoded it to Mpeg2. I wanted the file to MPEG2.

The results here were not good. The video was absolutely unuseable. There was signifcant artifacts. I must have done something wrong. Was it the codec..

TEST 2

Sent the file directly from Premiere Pro CS6 to encore via dynamic link. Selected DVD and widescreen. The encore transcode settings were set to automatic. The default settings were to use low quality 4mbs CBR. I changed it to high quality 7mbs CBR. Clicked enter. The file size showed just over 3GB. Put a disc in clicked start and went to bed.

Took forever to encode....don't really care about that but I have got to upgrade my graphics card. System is pretty robust but graphics card is two years old.

Anyway the DVD came out excellent. Virtually no artifacts.


Hope this helps. May even try VBR 2 pass to see how that turns out but overall I was pleased with TEST 2.

This was a test so I could see what the DVD would look like prior to sending it out to the client. I have some work to do.. but at least I am confident that the output to DVD is acceptible.

Darryl W
 
Glad to hear you were able to make your dvd work. And prores is part of Final Cut. VBR2 would be your best way to encode if possible it will reduce the size of the DVD without losing any quality. CBR is fine but takes some space on the DVD. In the end it is what ever works for you.
 
rzr219 said:
Wish I could help you, but I don't use Adobe. There must be a way to set the bit rate min and max. Don't go over 8 (older players don't like that) try to stay around 7.2 or so max and 2 Pass at VBR. To encode to MPEG should only take 20-30 minutes for a 2 hour DVD (or on my older Mac that what it takes sorta of). Don't put it on a disc, build a file on your hard drive and open it with your dvd player to see how it will turn out before you waste a disc. Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

In the second test the bit rate was set to CBR 7mbs encoded with a single pass. I did send it directly to a DVD. Regarding the encode time it is long (4 hours) but that is something for another discussion. Has something to do with the Matrox drivers I have on the computer. It used to be very fast but since installing the Matrox drivers it has slowed down AME considerably. Still need to upgrade the video card. Not worth tinkering with right now. Click and sleep.
 
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