My utopian future is a world without PAL to NTSC standards conversion.

Seriously.

Anyway. It's been ages since I've posted - I've been insanely busy (and I forgot this site even existed. Go me.)

An update from the wacky world of video post forthcoming.

Sorted

Compressor's HD to SD transcoding just doesn't cut it, even without standards conversion. Just unacceptable results.

I've cut my losses and rented the tape deck back in. Now all I have to do is sit here and wait whilst Sony's hardware downscaler makes stuff look shiny in real time. Much nicer.

The Sony HVR-M25 is a fairly neat bit of kit, complete with mostly unnecessary but very cool looking footage display on the front screen. Inputs are oddly lacking (just S-Video) for an HD Deck that boasts recording, but a full compliment of outputs are available including HDMI and all that nonsense. Visual Impact, the rental place I use, also supplied the thickest component video cable I've ever seen.

All this churning away is giving me ample time to push the menu concepts into production - the storyboard/planning process is one I quite enjoy, particularly so when I have free reign over the content. My earlier request to release these Travelogues as PAL was in hindsight a double edged sword - the time I projected to save would've been wasted converting the Motion templates, which I've already started in NTSC, to PAL. C'est la vie.

Hmm.

Compressor has done, dare I say, a good job of converting to DV PAL. However, now Procoder is completely fudging the transcode to NTSC, regardless of what settings I'm putting through it - getting the same motion artifacts I was seeing in the earlier transcodes. Baffling!

I've decided to ditch that idea for the moment, and going straight for a HD -> NTSC MPEG2 encode to see what happens. It's taking a very long time for a one-minute clip - at this rate will take 12 hours for a 1 hour programme. Not good.

In the meantime, have a picture of a kitten.

Partial Success

Pre-process deinterlacing is the key. I threw it onto the encode preset after realising that it probably isn't going to be good re-interlacing an interlaced source. I'm still getting mixed results, however.

On the upside, all the motion artifacts are gone. I even added a slight gamma correction to fix the hopelessly overexposed footage. Colour is looking a lot better but the picture quality is otherwise not acceptable - it's as if I'm viewing half the fields. Particularly evident on text.

Stay tuned for more exciting developments - I'm going to give 'automatic' frame controls a spin combined with the de-interlacing.

Software HD to SD conversion

This is particularly tricky when you're trying to get from 1080i50 to MPEG-2 NTSC 480i.

My current methodology is:

* Dump final edits to disc as HDV.
* Convert HDV to PAL DV (Avoiding Compressor's dodgy PAL -> NTSC methods, but by using, at most, a combination of 'Better' resizing and 'Fast' deinterlacing as any more makes a 12 hour transcode a 400 hour transcode on a dual processor G5. Awesome.)
* Import DV PAL into ProCoder to Standard Convert to NTSC.
* Profit

Caveat: One would like to import HDV, or even Apple's Intermediate Codec, direct into ProCoder to get this as one step, but Apple Quicktime on Windows doesn't fucking support either. Thanks guys, you make my life a big smile.

So that's done. My first results are pretty crappy - seriously wank looking motion blur, some visible interlacing artefacts. Now, do I rent the tape deck in again and re-capture using the deck's built in down-conversion or do I attempt different compressor settings in an attempt to eliminate the dodgy motion compensation?

As the latter is free, I'm going to try that.