HELP! HDV Projection... to SD? or stay 1080?

I have been editing HDV footage from the Z1 for 2 years now. What I find works best is to do you edit in FCP as native HDV. I then use Magic Bullet to grade the piece. The render can take for ever, but the result always looks great. Magic Bullet 2.1 has a setting (sorry can't remember which one it is) that makes HDV look much better. Read the manual if you must.

You can also do your edit and then use compressor to output a DVCProHD 720p60 file that you can then color grade. It will render faster, but will take up more drive space.

If you have lots of space and a fast enough drives you could color grade in Magic Bullet and then export out as Uncompressed HD 720p60 or Uncompressed HD 1080i.

If you go the DVD route, I have found that the best MPEG 2 files come from a progressive source. I always make a DVCPro HD 720p60 file and then use that to make my MPEG 2 files from. For some reason, MPEG 2 files direct from interlaced HDV look like crap.

Good luck,

Dan Weber

Thanks for the insight Dan-

I am glad to hear that you have had good results with the Z1. The director and I have had many headaches caused by HDV and finally it seems like there is light at the end of the tunnel!

When using MB2 do you deinterlace as well as grade? We're currently in the process of upgrading from MB1 and I haven't used it yet but I have heard the same things you said.

Also, how do you monitor HDV from After Effects, we don't have the hardware and have been grading via firewire to a TV but having problems to get the HDV to come up using this method. Any suggestions?

One last thing, do you think that screening from DVD is a viable option? From our experience we have been very disappointed with the results of HDV to DVD. After extensive research of different methods (via FCP, compressor, QT) still don't know what to do to get a suitable look.

Sorry about all the questions, just want to make sure the audience sees the film as it should be.

Thanks again,
John

Staying focused is key...

[Jeff Nelson] "downconverted to the size of the projector"

I've used a bunch of projectors. If the one you've got is even reasonably recent (say, past 3 or 4 years), it'll do downconversion just fine. I've even seen some desktop office projectors do downconverts that look downright stunning.

[Jeff Nelson] "HDV file, and play that off a laptop or desktop as a quicktime file"

Yep, if you like how it looks in the player of your choice, and the projector is recent, you're good to go.

BTW, I recommend the QT player. Any editing application (not just FCP) is borrowing system overhead for things besides playback. The QT player is lean and mean, and in my experience much less likely to hiccup during your projection.

Hi John:

I didn't do a bunch of testing to compare exact quality, but the thing looked great. We had two 10k projectors and 3 LCD screens, and the thing looked beautiful on all.

It didn't have any hiccups, of course that was my concern, but I ran the thing several times from start to finish, hdv using quicktime at fullscreen, and it never hiccuped once, so I figured I was good. I didn't bring a smaller laptop but my big Mac Pro with has plenty of resources to handle anything, just to be sure there wouldn't be any issues.

How it worked is that it went out via my ATI graphics card into a downcoverter that the projection place had, and from there they split it off to the various projectors and LCD screens. The company doing this has shows in Vegas and handles a lot of big rock acts, so they are a top place (and probably pretty expensive).

But that's as much as I knew, never got far into it technically I'm afraid. Just got lucky and, as I said, it looked like a feature up there on the big screen.

Good luck!

[Jerry Alto] "Use the camera's analog outputs to deliver the best picture the projector can deliver"

The question is, what kind of projector is it? If it's a theatrical projector, or one designed primarily for television viewing, Jerry's exactly right. Especially if your camera has HDMI out, you're in tall cotton.

It's still more common to see data-oriented projectors. The good news is that they've had HD resolutions for several years, for a fraction of the price of a TV-oriented one, and often small enough to fit in a bag barely bigger than a laptop or two. Which is why they're so common.

I always have a couple of adapters on hand -- VGA to DVI is the handiest by far. Apple includes one standard with all their laptops. (Or did the last couple of times I bought one), but they're easy to find at Radio Shack, etc. With any desktop LCD, or even better a DLP (quite common in conference rooms and theaters), even the lowliest of VGA connections looks great. People will definitely be able to tell that you're projecting HD, even at SD res.

I see DLP projects just under half the time, and growing fast. Output from your laptop via DVI is stunning. Generally speaking (and I do mean generally), a projector with DVI is going to have at least 720 out, and many will have native 1080...or half-size res with a hardware scaler. You won't be able to tell the difference, I promise.

In other words, there are many, many cases where you won't be downconverting at all. You'll be HD all the way. So ask.

And in any case, if your camera is going to be handiest, and the projector has component HD, go for it. VGA and DVI will likely look better than any of your camera's other outputs.

Thanks guys-

Jerry:
The component idea is probably our best bet, waiting to hear if the projector has 1080i capability. What if it doesn't? How would we do SD from the deck/camera to projector? The projectionist doesn't seem to know and I thought you would have some insight.

Tim:
Do you reckon that DVI is the second best choice after straight HDV? And playing direct from a laptop? I wasn't sure about depending on the CPU over tape and the potential of having a freeze up or god knows what happen on the night. What would you recommend?


Derek:
Thanks for the tips regarding the DV tape versus HDV. You make a compelling point that although I haven't heard before, it makes total sense. With so much compression going on with the HDV signal going onto a DV tape there are bound to be problems. If HDV is our final delivery method it will certainly be via, HDV specific tapes.

Thanks to everyone for your constructive ideas. Just remains to see how everything performs next week! I post some pix and hopefully have some press.

Cheers,
John

Staying focused is key...

John- I said deck in my previous response but if you only have the Z-1 then you will be using it as your playback device. It has all the same connections as a Sony HDV deck. You'll need that special component cable that came with the camera. The camera has the same playback i/o menu as the decks.

Jerry

G5 Dual 3GB Ram
FCP5 Studio
External 1 TB SATA Raid 0
Kona LH, Second system w AJA ioLA
Sony Z-1

[ronin vidster] "In my experience, the free player VLC is a better option."

Cool! I've never seen that before. It looks like a dandy player for all kinds of things. Thanks for passing that along.

To try to bottom line it, the projector is the most important consideration. You've only got the connections you've got, and you'll use what you can.

A couple of tips from a "projector on the road" ninja who's gotten burned before:

1) Have it in multiple forms. I'll never every use a camera as a deck, but that's just me. But if you do, bring it on a laptop anyway. And always have an SD DVD on hand. No matter what goes wrong, short of the projector bulb burning out, you're covered. That might seem like a lot of work, but less time wasted than getting to the gig and not being able to play at all.

2) If humanly possible, get there early. I can't even count the number of times that I've asked multiple people about the projector before the gig...and they're all wrong. More than once, I've wound up running to Radio Shack to get a connector.

You have to let us know how this all turns out!

tw

This might be a little late for the original poster, but I thought I would add my 2 cents. An important thing to realize about all projectors that you are going to run into, be they LCD, DLP, or LCOS, is that they do not support interlace. What that means is that if you feed the projector an interlaced signal it needs to deinterlace it internally, and the chances are that the internal deinterlacer inside the projector isn't going to be very good. So my recommedation is that you deinterlace your finished projects before projection with a high quality algorithm, such as the one that After Effects uses, and then encode to a format that supports progressive frames. HDV sorta kinda does, but I would either playback from a computer through DVI, or HD-DVD/Blu-Ray in the near future. You can do 720p 59.94 or 50 from DVDSP for HD-DVD on a DVD-R, and when Adobe Encore CS3 gets released, it will do most of the flavors of HD for Blu-Ray on actual Blu-Ray discs.

Not to toot my own horn, but if you want more information about deinterlacing I have an article about it here.

Josh

http://www.indiemaster.org