Quaity of Converting HDV to DV in your NLE software

I recently moved to the consumer HDV world, and shoot a simple Sony HC7 in HDV format.

For now, I am still making regular old DVDs for sharing my videos and watching. (someday, I'll upgrade all that home consumer electronics stuff.... but not right now)

Anyways.. I'm still using the relatively inexpensive Adobe Premiere 3.0 as my NLE, and discovered that the HDV footage looks great while on the computer screen, but when burnt to a DVD, if I let Adobe Premiere 3.0 do the conversion from HDV to DV the resulting DVD video is fuzzy, soft, and lacking contrast. It sucks!

My workaround, is to do the HDV to DV conversion in the camera at time of capture, importing the video into the computer as DV. Image quality is much better and acceptable on the resulting DVD.

I'm curious what other NLE systems others are using, and what your experiences have been with other software programs, HDV to DV conversion. I'd like to capture in HDV, just one time. Thats my goal.

Perhaps I need a better NLE suite?

Appreciate any input.

I recently moved to the consumer HDV world, and shoot a simple Sony HC7 in HDV format.

 

For now, I am still making regular old DVDs for sharing my videos and watching. (someday, I'll upgrade all that home consumer electronics stuff.... but not right now)

 

Anyways.. I'm still using the relatively inexpensive Adobe Premiere 3.0 as my NLE, and discovered that the HDV footage looks great while on the computer screen, but when burnt to a DVD, if I let Adobe Premiere 3.0 do the conversion from HDV to DV the resulting DVD video is fuzzy, soft, and lacking contrast. It sucks!

 

My workaround, is to do the HDV to DV conversion in the camera at time of capture, importing the video into the computer as DV. Image quality is much better and acceptable on the resulting DVD.

 

I'm curious what other NLE systems others are using, and what your experiences have been with other software programs, HDV to DV conversion. I'd like to capture in HDV, just one time. Thats my goal.

 

Perhaps I need a better NLE suite?

 

Appreciate any input.

I use Final Cut Suite (Mac) and get very good results with Compressor, the newest one works very well. (I also use some other encoders from time to time). On the PC side of things Wagsy uses Edius and gets very nice results (have seen the web exports and they look good, he says the DVD side works very well, I would guess he may pop in and give some more details, but he knows his stuff.)

I have not used Premiere but one thing to check is how you set up the encoding (it is part art and part science)...and many people due like the way that the Sonys do in camera conversion...but if the quality is what you want logging and capturing twice may be worth it (subject to wear on the camera.)

Hi wolfeeldiver

I can tell you that Premier Pro is still not very good at rendering out files unless you you use a 3rd party plug in encoder.

I would suggest you encode out a DV or HDV file after you edit and run it through a good cheap stand alone encode like http://www.tmpgenc.net/en/index.html or http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/te3xp.html .

Another thing one use to be able to do is frameserve out of Premier Pro to one of these encoders but I'm not sure if it works with the Premiere now. http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/tutorials/frameserve.php

The best way to encode out the MPEG2 files is to go CBR 8mbps if you have plenty of room on your DVD. 2 pass encoding does not improve the quality, just takes longer as it tries to make the file smaller. You can go to 9mbps but you may find some laptops may not play them if they have bugs or other little problems. Even other DVD players may have a hard time playing them.

Making normal DVD's from HDV material in your NLE does give better quality than making them from down converted HDV from the camera but you still can get great results.

I was once a Premier Pro user until I found a strange mostly unkown at the time NLE called EDIUS. It runs rings around Premier Pro for straight editing and encoding of HDV or DV and making DVD's is very fast and easy. It will even edit the HDV & DV together on either a HDV or DV timeline.

Thanks for all the great input. Much appreciated it is!

If I am making a standard definition DVD from HDV footage, I set my project setting in Sony Vegas Pro 8.0b to DV and then I frameserve using the Debugmode Frameserver to Cinemacraft Encoder Basic which does the MPEG2 compression.

In this scenario Vegas is doing the resizing.

You won't find a better MPEG2 encoder than Cinemacraft and the Basic version is good value. And it is much faster than TMPEG. But it will not downsample from high definition. You have to feed it a standard definition stream.

Debugmode Frameserver works in Premiere I think. Frameserving saves you having to make an intermediate file. It writes the intermediate file on the fly as it is needed by the next application.