How to get that final soft hollywood look

[Jerry]

Make sure all of your settings for encoding are correct. Especially, if you are going to SD.
A company I did work for hired someone to shoot footage
with a Red camera. The footage may have looked good in the original form, but by the time I saw it on DVD onto a non-supported 24p playback setup, it looked like !@#!@#.
This was at a convention where they were promoting their
business services. The displayed footage had tearing and ripples throughout the video-on anything that moved.
The footage shot with a Z1 that was incorporated into the project, blewwwww the Red Footage away.


It is not just one variable, but many. As Dave said, you need to keep your workflow the same all the way through the project. You will then only be at the mercy of the final display equipment...and you can't control that.

[Bassman]

Some clarification on various points from this thread:

1) Mpeg-2 can be 720p24, 720p60/50, 1080i60/50 and 1080p24 This is for Blu-ray Only.

2) DVD is always in 60i or 50i standard definition wrapper. But, one can put native 24p footage on a DVD and have it playback as 24p via proper authoring using pulldown. So in effect DVD can accept 24p and 50/60i footage. Every major motion picture released in DVD is made this way.

3) If you want a "film" look I would not shoot in 50/60 interlaced. The motion might be smoother but films do not look this way. The film look involves less to no camera panning, or the camera hardly moving at all.

With the mess of formats, framerates and resolution you really need to let your final output decide your input choices. On the whole, 24p and 50/60i are the safest bet for DVD, Blu-ray and internet.

This is where a program like Edius really come to the fore as it is very useful when combining & creating different footage. I usually shoot in 720p60 and will often render out an HQ file, drop it on a 24p timeline, then render that out to be placed back into my 60p project. And I get 24p footage that looks right at home in my 60p stream or 24p footage ready to be encoded for the internet.

What I do not know is the European T.V. set and how it deals with 24p. Sadly, 25p seems to have been left off of the Blu-ray spec.

Hope this helps.

[kierank]

What I do not know is the European T.V. set and how it deals with 24p. Sadly, 25p seems to have been left off of the Blu-ray spec.

Hope this helps.

European TV sets can handle 24p fine. Generally 24p is only found on European releases since some US HDTVs can't handle 24p well (though 23.976 works fine). 1080p25 is allowed in the Blu-ray spec for H.264 (and possibly for VC-1 and mpeg-2) by encoding the frames progressively but flagging the stream as interlaced. x264 has a "fake interlaced" mode for doing this and I think Mainconcept has something similar. I've seen the Top Gear Botswana disc released like this.