HD timeline to SD DVD - pretty bad

[Martin_Gleeson]

I'm kind of gutted here - and hoping I'm doing something wrong. I have just created my first SD DVD from a HD timeline. The footage was captured as HQ PAL 1440 x 1080i from two Canon XH A1's.
I then converted to MPEG2 SD from the Edius timeline using Procoder 3.0. My settings are attached.

The quality on the finished DVD is quite poor. I compared it to one of my SD projects which was created from a Sony V2100 (4:3).

The new 16:9 project (from the Canons) is not near as sharp and blurs much more detail. There are artifacts, "dot crawl" and so on. The 4:3 VX2100 project has much better color, is much sharper and clearer. The whole point of me getting the Canons is that I would have widescreen; and also have much higher quality source material, and thus lead to higher quality SD DVD's.

Next thing I did as an experiment was to change the output settings in Edius from HD (where the project looks fantastic) to SD output. The quality drop is far more drastic than a normal switch from HD to SD. It really is unacceptable.

Where am I going wrong? How could this (expensive) switch from SD to HD result in much poorer quality SD output.

I'm just feeling sick and depressed about this (it's the last nail in what's been a terrible few months). Have I just wasted a lot of money here?


Procoder Settings.jpg

[Angelo]

Your settings look fine, other than I close GOP (shouldn't effect quality). I'm guessing you are using ProCoder3? Have you tried to use ProCoder2 for mepeg2 encoding?

I'm editing in SD with the DVStorm and I notice a great improvement with HDV 1440x1080 down-converted to HQ 720x480 16:9 over DV 4:3 converted to 16:9.

...Angelo

[mattmatt]

Martin, that soesn't sound nice at all. But even though all seems bleek - you havn't wasted any money, or time. You're cannon's ability to shoot HDV is an investment in itself, no waste there. Your experimenting is only teaching you things you will be able to use in the future, so no waste there.

The fact that there are artifacts is alarming, especially at that bitrate. How long is the video? How complex is it (i.e. moving water? Smoke? Fire? Detailed trees?)

The things that come to mind are...

1). Try Variable bitrate (2pass, max 8kbps)
2). Is the content from both videos comparable? (no point comparing low light, in doors, to beaturiful afternoon light, out doors)
3). Do you have an older version of edius? (like 4.1xx???) try the same thing there....might be a new proplem to ad the to list of 4.5xx.

As far as I've heard, you should be getting lovely results....

Good luck!

[GrassValley_BH]

The 16x9 vs 4x3 thing you can't really get around. 16x9 DVDs will always lose some amount of sharpness because of the anamorphic nature of proper 16x9 DVD encoding. Of course it's way better than encoding a letterboxed image, but it still being horizontally stretched.

The downscaling process should result in a bit of a sharpening effect, but it can also introduce weird scaling artifacts if there's a lot of detail in the original image. That's why I sometimes recommend adding a slight blur to the image before downscaling.

The sharper and more detail there is in the original image, the more difficult it is for the encoder. That said, 7 Mbps should be providing a near visually-lossless image.

Can you post a few stills from the encoded result?

[Martin_Gleeson]

Hi Guys,

Thanks a lot for the replies. Just some points:

1. The DVD from the HD Canon's is a wonderful outdoor scene in bright sunlight. The one from the SD Sony is inside a bride's bedroom. The bride's room video looks much better.

2. The DVD from the Canon is much softer than the one from the SD Sony. It has trees, a pebble-dash wall and lots of cars. There is shimmering, combing and blurring whenever the camera moves.

3. I don't think it's a DVD encoding issue. When I change the Edius project to SD and output to my monitor, the quality is very poor. Much poorer than switching from a HD to SD on say cable TV.

4. The stills don't look too bad, because there is no movement.

5. I reminds me of the quality drop when try to switch a 4:3 camera to 16:9 (like the VX2100). It's a real step back from the quality I had.

[Bassman]

Gosh,

I am sorry to hear of this situation for you Martin.

I hope this gets resolved for you and for the rest of us.

HD sounds great, but the reality is that SD DVDs will be delivered for quite some time.

From Canopus' point of view, is this atypical?

Or this an over looked topic in the enthusiasm to shoot in HD?

[NHaskett]

Yes it all seems a bit of a problem.
I was looking at a demo of the new Sony PMW-EX1 camera which uses flash memory, yesterday. Produces a magic result but then I guess it should for $9k. Looks like I need to upgrade to a 47 inch HD LCD tv to veiw the result, and I'm waiting on the new generation of ICs to build a new editing machine with Edius NX express. As well I need to upgrade to Edius Broadcast. Then I have the problem of being over 60yo. Hmmmm

Nev

[antonsvideo]

Hi Guys,

Thanks a lot for the replies. Just some points:

1. The DVD from the HD Canon's is a wonderful outdoor scene in bright sunlight. The one from the SD Sony is inside a bride's bedroom. The bride's room video looks much better.

2. The DVD from the Canon is much softer than the one from the SD Sony. It has trees, a pebble-dash wall and lots of cars. There is shimmering, combing and blurring whenever the camera moves.

3. I don't think it's a DVD encoding issue. When I change the Edius project to SD and output to my monitor, the quality is very poor. Much poorer than switching from a HD to SD on say cable TV.

4. The stills don't look too bad, because there is no movement.

5. I reminds me of the quality drop when try to switch a 4:3 camera to 16:9 (like the VX2100). It's a real step back from the quality I had.

can you upload 3 - 5 seconds of your hdv file somewhere, I will then encode it to DVD compliant file with Tmpeg4 so that you can compare

maybe this problem is only related to similar issues in 4.5, I will try it in 4.03 for you

[Bluetongue]

HD to SD

Martin
Something is really wrong, I have been doing this for ages using Edius and Procoder 3
Cameras as below including XHA1 and HV20 which are a mega sharper than the Sony FX1 and the DVD's are definately sharper than the 4x3 I used to make from a Sony TRV900.
Coming from HDV to SD seems to just be that bit better.
Settings I use are as follows
Project HDV 1440x1080 Canopus HQ, are you using HQ or Native HDV
Pro Coder 3
the only difference to your settings are as folloows
Audio is encoded separately as Dolby ac3 256 kb
Video 2 Pass
Video Bit rate 8000
Max Bit rate 8000
Min Bit rate 0
Audio Dont use - encoded separately
Authered in DVD Lab Pro 2.3
Results are perfect - Perhaps its the Authoring program are you using Encore a friend of mine is having real problems with it regarding quality
Hope this helps
Regards Barry

[Bluetongue]

One other thing Martin I use Edius as software only, I have had nothing but trouble with editing cards so will not go near them. I notice you are using EDIUS NX Express card, is there a driver problem or something wrong with the card?
Regards Barry

[kwshaw1]

Try switching your Edius project definition setting to widescreen DV (instead of HDV) before doing the SD output. This causes Edius to process your HD footage to SD resolution before handing it off to Procoder for the MPEG2 conversion, which may yield significantly better results. Edius has had a major problem rendering SD output from HD source which as far as I know has not been fixed, even though this is a critical top-priority do it now issue. If this hasn't been fixed yet in version 4.5, someone in Grass Valley management should make it their mission to get this solved quickly. Please.

P.S. Also try changing your SD encoding settings to include "lower field first" instead of upper field.

By using the above approach I'm getting widescreen DVDs which look great on my 1080p LCD display. Much better than what I could get from my old Canon DV cameras.

[Khoi Pham]

I'm kind of gutted here - and hoping I'm doing something wrong. I have just created my first SD DVD from a HD timeline. The footage was captured as HQ PAL 1440 x 1080i from two Canon XH A1's.
I then converted to MPEG2 SD from the Edius timeline using Procoder 3.0. My settings are attached.

The quality on the finished DVD is quite poor. I compared it to one of my SD projects which was created from a Sony V2100 (4:3).

The new 16:9 project (from the Canons) is not near as sharp and blurs much more detail. There are artifacts, "dot crawl" and so on. The 4:3 VX2100 project has much better color, is much sharper and clearer. The whole point of me getting the Canons is that I would have widescreen; and also have much higher quality source material, and thus lead to higher quality SD DVD's.

Next thing I did as an experiment was to change the output settings in Edius from HD (where the project looks fantastic) to SD output. The quality drop is far more drastic than a normal switch from HD to SD. It really is unacceptable.

Where am I going wrong? How could this (expensive) switch from SD to HD result in much poorer quality SD output.

I'm just feeling sick and depressed about this (it's the last nail in what's been a terrible few months). Have I just wasted a lot of money here?


[ATTACH]259[/ATTACH]

I'm using the same camera and edius/pc2/encore and I am getting pristine image, what authoring program are you using? sometime if you don't have something right the authoring program might reencode again and that could give you a poor picture quality, but I'm in ntsc, could there be a problem with Pal?

[Martin_Gleeson]

Anton,

You're a gentleman! You can download the clip (95mb) from here. If it's too big, I understand. The clip looks great in HD, but the movement around the grass, trees and the kirb behind the guy with the phone shows a lot of "shimmering" in SD.

http://www.dreamscapes.ie/outside/sampleHD.avi

Matt and Barry,

I left the PC doing a couple of VBR encodes when I left this morning. I exported the timeline to HQ file so I could try a few different options. We'll see how that looks later.


Khoi,

I use Encore. I'm fairly sure it didn't re-encode the video. It created the DVD image a bit too quick for that. Also, it had a transcode status of "Don't Transcode".

On another issue: Did you find that the images are a bit bled out, slightly overexposed and lacking color?

Kevin,

I'll try that workflow. But I was under the impression that this issue had been fixed in PC3 (jaggies on downconverted files).

Many thanks to all
Martin

[Khoi Pham]

I use Encore. I'm fairly sure it didn't re-encode the video. It created the DVD image a bit too quick for that. Also, it had a transcode status of "Don't Transcode".

On another issue: Did you find that the images are a bit bled out, slightly overexposed and lacking color?

I shoot manual so they are pretty good most of the time, if you shoot auto and they are overexposed then you want to go into the menu and adjust "ae shift , the camera straight out of the box is a little flat, I change all settings to my taste, if you like email me privately and I will send you my preset cuz that will be off topic here and they will delete it.

[Jonathan Porter]

Editing in HDV and viewing the Hi Def footage during the edit via the NX card is always going to leave you feeling a little disappointed when you view the resultant SD DVD, especially if you are trying to cram a lot of footage onto a single layer DVD.

I'm looking forward to when the Hi Def DVD wars are over and everything is running smoothly both for editing, authoring and delivery.

JP