Re: Att: Graeme, Walter, et al - HDV/DVCPRO Workflow, etc

They look about as good as they're going to look. I also have used the KONA 2 card to do similar things and it looks great although you have slightly more control with the Tera Nex. I will share this experience though- with a UFC upconverter. Our doc had many formats all heading for our uncompressed HD online. Our target was 23.98 4:2:2 uncompressed, and one of the DV shots had ben filmed with a DVX100 in bright light, and the DP had evidently used the 'skinny shutter' that can end up giving the footage that staccatto, 'Saving Private Ryan' look. In our first pass, taking footage that already looked like that and deinterlacing, upconverting, and changing the frame rate to 23.98- the look became very pronounced so we changed the setting on the UFC to be less film like (if I remember corerectly there are similar settings on the Tera Nex, you choose something like either 'sports' or 'cinema')and the footage looked much smoother and totally acceptable... until it was encoded for DVD. Somehow imperceptibly those shots were different and out of the 90 minute feature those shots now had venetian blinds over them, which was a simple fix- deinterlacing them again, although they were already deinterlaced.

So it may be a good idea if you haven't done a lot of this to test the shots all the way through the finished format.