HDV project to SD DVD Best migration?

[VideoOpp]

I am outputting my first HDV project and have gone direct from timeline to mastering quality in PC 3.0. I am not happy with the results. I am getting way to many moiré patterns and a kind of video banding or buzzing, especially during video dissolves. Is there a better way to go? Should I output the timeline to some other format first before going to PC 3? Canopus Lossless AVI? HQ?

[GrassValley_BH]

The key information elements we need are:
Length of clip (time-length)
and
Bitrate of encoding

[VideoOpp]

Video is 7 minites long.

I set it to 6000 min, 7000 Bit rate 8000 max

[GrassValley_BH]

Okay. One more question (should've asked in the beginning oh well) - what device are you watching the MPEG-2 output on?

Some of the artifacting is probably due to fine details since you're coming from an HD source. You may actually want to add a small amount of blur to the source.

[VideoOpp]

It is a SD tube monitor. I do not notice it as much playing on a laptop. This program is going to be projected on a large screen through a video projector. So you are saying that it may not buzz in that environment as much?

Are you also saying that it would not have helped me to export the time line to an AVI file first? That I did indeed use the best possible route for a HDV to SD DVD?

[VideoOpp]

OK, I noticed that my widescreen monitor has several "widescreen" options. It was on a theater setting which I believe was greater then it should have been for this DVD. When I changed it to the other widescreen option about 90% of my problems went away. I am much happier now!

[GrassValley_BH]

Most widescreen monitors/projectors have 3 basic modes:

• Wide/stretch
  16:9 content is displayed full-screen properly
  4:3 content is stretched to 16:9
• Normal
  16:9 content is squeezed to 4:3
  4:3 content is displayed 4:3
• Zoom (sometimes called 4:3 Letterbox mode)
  16:9 content gets zoomed (top/bottom/left/right cut off)
  4:3 content is zoomed to fill the full display area (top/bottom cut off)

Some monitors/projectors also have additional modes:

• Subtitle
  Either the image is zoomed to the same factor as zoom mode, but the bottom of the image is kept at the bottom of the screen, so only the top gets cut off, or a smaller zoom factor is used to preserve the bottom area of the, where subtitles normally appear
• 2.35 Zoom
  The image is zoomed so 2.35:1 aspect movies (which still have letterboxing in a 16:9 frame) fill the entire screen (left/right cut off)
• Nonlinear stretch (most times this has some kind of "brand feature name")
  This is similar to Wide mode, except it applies a non-linear stretch so 4:3 content fills a 16:9 screen without the typical "fat people" effect.
  Stretching is less apparent in the center of the display and increases toward the outer edge.

[GrassValley_BH]

I should also comment on the other aspect of "settings" in consumer displays...

The ones with names like Cinema, Sports, Movie, Bright, and Vivid.

These are brightness/hue/saturation/gamma presets. Many times they can take an OK image to Great, but they can also take an OK image to Junk.

For example, most times black is not pure black - it's various shades of near-black. Change the gamma enough and now you start to see a difference between 100% black and 99% black and now what is supposed to be black is starting to look ugly and "muddy" just like when you increase the contract on an image too much.

I don't like all these presets... I much rather have a "flat" curve, but even in prosumer equipment this is often difficult to achieve because there are so many variables in the chain. If you have a front or rear projector, the screen transmission/reflection properties add yet another variable. Fun... not!