Share experiences with Nattress Standards Converter?

I have started a VERY big project which entails me converting 20+ half hour programs per month from NTSC to PAL (these are going to Europe and Africa, eventually to India as well - the client requires that they be converted). On the advice of other users I purchased the Converter and have begun the process. The tutorial movies help but don't really give me a real world picture (no pun intended) on the perils and pitfalls, and I am wondering if other editors who have used it have any helpful tips. I realize it's not going to look like I used an Alchemist, but I want the end product to look as good as possible...

What is the experience of others with regards to a) encoding times and b) quality of the final product? The original Quicktimes are edited HD 1080i and I am making them anamorphic PAL DV. I took a 32 minute program, followed the instructions to convert it - and it took 8+ hours to finish. Is this normal based upon my system specs?

Thanks!

Mac Pro 2.5 Ghz Dual Intel Xeon
Leopard 10.5.8
13 GB RAM
FCP 7 and all updates

Graeme's tool is a very good one, but at that volume of production, you're really going to have to send the tapes out to be run through a standards converter. It'll be a real-time process, obviously, and that's a good thing, but more importantly you're going to get guaranteed consistent and repeatable results.

It's also a huge mistake to downconvert everything to DV. If you're being asked to do a downconversion and a standards conversion at the same time, that's fine, but you really can't get away with sending out DV material for broadcast. Not even to overseas markets.

Thanks Jeff - I agree that Graeme's tool is very good - the final quality looks darn close to the original. But the time factor is murderous.

>But the time factor is murderous.

I haven't tried Graeme's standards converter yet. But Compressor takes quite a while, and on a single thread process probably much slower than Graeme's solution, however you can get it running on quick clusters, which will allow you to utilize all 8 cores on a Mac Pro. Not sure which is faster between the two.

As Jeff mentioned, there are a few real time formats converters in the market- Snell and Wilcox has the Alchemist, Teranex has a few modules which does the trick. The trade off will definitely be price.



www.strypesinpost.com

I'll check with my local duplication house - I know they do conversions, but as you stated, price will be the tradeoff. Fortunately, some of these episodes are being mastered back to PAL DVD's, which I can use DVDSP to complete - the other problem is the client doesn't have a production bible and needs one badly (we're talking multiple editors on different platforms worldwide...) Looks like I may be writing the production bible, too?

Yeah run those through a nice terranex box- it would be a 2-3 day job vs. a week or more with Nattress. Which I love to death but even he would probably agree that volume would take forever.

Noah

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what's a production bible?



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Also known as a format guide - its a written set of standards for a broadcast program, such as type of fonts, font size, colors allowed, screen placement, lower thirds, etc. I've had to use them for Discovery Channel, Lifetime and Speed Channel, as well as ESPN, etc. It codifies everything you need to know in order to produce the program that is broadcast-ready.

>Also known as a format guide

Ah. I'm familiar with this term. Never knew it was called the production bible, though. Well, good luck on the conversion.



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Thanks - I'm going to steer them toward the duplication house!

Another option to consider is to purchase or rent a convertor. If you have 10 hours a month to convert, and will be doing that for many months you might find that route is economical. You could purchase one used, with the idea of reselling it at the end of the contract.

-V

Ah, renting a converter is a novel idea! I'll check into that route, too, thanks!

Been using Nattress for years on NTSC projects. The big difference between him and Compressor is Motion Prediction. Compressor has it and Nattress doesn't. If it's necessary to convert a violently kicked football, Nattress will do what converters for years did, they motion blur the ball and hope nobody notices. Most people don't and haven't for a long time.

The grown-up converters and Compressor try to figure out where the football is going and create a new, sharp, clear football in the right place at the right time. This takes huge processing power, lots of time, or a very large, loud box in an air-conditioned rack.

Not that Compressor is perfect. Occasionally, it will get the prediction a little off and produce "swimmy" motion.

You need to go a long way to beat Nattress.

Koz

>Not that Compressor is perfect. Occasionally, it will get the prediction a little off and produce
>"swimmy" motion.

Okay, I didn't notice it the last time I ran a standards conversion with Compressor, however, I do use Compressor for slow mos (it's slightly more trustworthy than Motion IMHO), and I'm wondering if there's any other tool that is more effective with slow motion.

>This takes huge processing power, lots of time

The difference is that you are able to render with multiple cores in Compressor versus a single threaded process in FCP, even though it's a lot of math for multiple cores.



www.strypesinpost.com