HDV to DVD, making progress

ok, i finally had enough of all my HDV questions, so i went and rented a z1 this afternoon and shot a bunch of stuff. intentionally trying to get all teh stuff HDV is worst at (low light diagonal motion, etc...)

came back, captured native HDV into FCP, edited it down and made a downconverted dvd - looks like DUNG!
maybe some of you compression gurus here can help.

im exporting to compressor from my fcp timeline. did it first as anamorphic dv ntsc.
burnt both a 4:3 and 16:9 (letterbox) version. both played back fine and didnt look horrible - but neither looked good. and the flying text overlay (from an animation compressed +alpha) from after effects was artifacted like a bastard!

so i did another export via compressor, this time as an HDV 1080i60 mpeg 2 - just shooting in the dark there... played back at almost 2x speed with all kinda ghosting, but the image looked better.

what would anyone suggest as the best way to come out of the fcp timeline if one wanted a nice looking ntsc dvd? im afraid the answer is to not do it at all...?

Hi Wayne,

Been doing that for over a month now. I shot the Z1 and captured the movie into FCP. The editing went fine. Then I did a great looking layback to camera and made a DVD on an external DVD recorder. This was a rough cut. Then I polished the movie and now I can't get out to my camera again. :-) I forgot what I did. So now I'm stuck. And I can't make the iDVD or the DVD STudio Pro work at all.

I read on this website that Larry Jordan says not to use the Compressor from FCP. He says it doesn't work. He recommends opening Compressor and bringing the movie into the Compressor. However, he also says that that HD is already MPEG 2 and that it shouldn't be recompressed as MPEG 2. Interesting when I tried, I ended up with a cinemascope version of the anamorphic image -- that is double anamorphic. LOL

Let me know of progress -- Vic

what Larry said is that you MUST export the Hdv Timeline first as a self contained Quicktime movie to reconstruct the iFrame structure as a Mpeg 2 file

I wonder can this go right into Dvd SP ? I mean isn't bite rate to hight ?

Well, I was finally able to get a DVD out! I converted the HDV movie I'd shot on the Z1 in HD 1080i and edited in FCP 5. Then I made a Quick Time movie out of it and then I opened it in iDVD and clicked on BURN and it did it. I still can't go back to camera though. Oh, yes, the DVD came out Ok and I guess it's standard digital video now. It must be MPEG 2. Am I right?

ok, that really told us nothing...??? how did you "convert" the movie you shot? then what kind of "quicktime" did you make?? - SPECIFICS man???

anyone can make a bad dvd , i made a dvd that "came out" ok, but it looked horrible...the question is what did it look like???

i made two (well, 4 if you count 4:3 / 16:9 playback aspects) DVDs. one from the 1080i z1 AND THE 720P30 HD100. i played them on a dvd player to a SD tv for a non "video-head" friend, and she said that what she saw from the z1 looked "better" than the HD100. and i have to agree

keep this in mind. im no "tech-head" and from a shooting standpoint i have no idea how to level the field between one video shot at 1080i and another at 720p30...

im sure a better shooter could have provided a better baseline???

I'll try to reconstruct what I did later, but for now, here's what I did. I hope I can repeat the process, because I tried so many things with no luck for days. I made a quick time movie from the finished movie with dissolves and titles. The movie was 45 minutes long. It was shot on HDV 1080i. I converted it to quick time movie and chose all the setting that would produce the best results: apple intermediate codec, mpeg 2, best quality on everything, sound at 48 kHz, etc. Then I opened it in iDVD and it made a copy that wasn't HD, so I must've converted it to SD. I looked at the finished DVD on my regular tv and it didn't look as good as the HDV that I shot on the camera and played on the same tv monitor, but it was nearly as good. The colors were a bit more garish and the image wasn't as crisp. The sound was a bit worse too.

well, all of that - garish color and worse sound quality, IMO = unacceptable DVD.

there is no point in shooting in a supposed "better format" if the end ntsc result is teh same or worse as just shooting in dv to begin with.

i just assumed in the spirit of higher quality in = higher quality out would apply in th eHDV to DV downconvert... im think that isnt true in this case...

OK guys, there are quite a lot of steps in the "HDV in - crap DVD out" pipeline that you are describing here, and plenty of places to go wrong.

Firstly iDVD does NOT produce good MPEG2 video. It's OK - good enough for a home movie, but noticably worse than Compressor, for example.

BUT Compressor needs to be used properly, and don't assume the presets will give the best results.

here is the 'received wisdom' that I have heard around the web about going from HDV to DVD - sorry I don't have specifics but I'm doing this from memory:

ROUTE 1 - edit in HDV
1. capture HDV
2. edit in HDV sequence - add compression markers to ensure I frames on tricky movement (look it up in help)
3 here's where the paths diverge - most folk say DON'T use export using compressor - apparently does funny things.
The question is whether to export an HDV file then use compressor to compress to MPEG2 SD (which works but is S L O W as anything) or whether to drop your HDV sequence into an SD (ideally uncompressed, or DV?) sequence, let FCP render it then export to a file and open in compressor.
Don't have a strong view on this one, except the former is simpler to do.
4. compress the file in compressor (standalone) starting from the highest quality MPEG2 preset, but AVOIDING the 2-pass VBR setting (yes, apparently it was broken, but may have just been fixed - don't know yet) and bumping UP the max bitrate to 7Mps or around that point.
5. import into DVDSP
6. burn DVD
7. enjoy results.

ROUTE 2 - edit in DV or DVCProHD.
1. capture in HDV and transcode into DVCProHD or DV (either using HDVxDV or FCP and dropping the clip into a DVCProHD timeline and exporting) - LOTS of rendering.

OR

Use in-camera downconversion to capture in DV.
Differing views on whether in-camera conversion is better or worse than in FCP conversion. General view seems to be that FCP does it better, but of course you have to render it all, so if you are in a hurry you might want to just use the cam. I my experience the in-camera downconversion is very good and produces 'better than DV DV' if you see what I mean.

2. edit in DV or DVCProHD sequence - add compression markers to ensure I frames on tricky movement (look it up in help)
3 DON'T use export using compressor - apparently does funny things.
Export from FCP as DV or DVCProHD quicktime file
4. compress the file in compressor (standalone) starting from the highest quality MPEG2 preset, but AVOIDING the 2-pass VBR setting (yes, apparently it was broken, but may have just been fixed - don't know yet) and bumping UP the max bitrate to 7Mps-7.5Mbps or around that point.
5. import into DVDSP
6. burn DVD
7. enjoy results.

OK that's my basic summary, though I may have missed something.

I have personally used the latter route so far and am fairly happy with the results.
BY FAR the biggest influence is the compressor settings - you really need to fiddle with those, to get good results on shorter clips.

Have fun.

Dave

thanks dave, that helped a lot!

opening a new 10bit uncompresssed sequence and dropping the 1080 HDV sequence onto it - then exporting an mpeg2 from compressor was definitely a decent option. and resulted in a much better dvd. the text overlay looked a lot better.