Get lovely 16x9 HDV output on DVDs (how to)

[Stephen Armour]

I recently had some major issues with trying to use HDV 1440x1080i PP2 input/output for doing DVDs.

Since I have plenty of years of PP experience and many DVD productions under my belt, I figured it would be a no-brainer ... ha..ha..ha.

Just to clarify things, I am using the great Cineform Aspect 4.1 plugin to ingest and edit in PP2, just so my old dual Xeon (SCSI RAID with 10K Cheetahs) can still handle things more or less okay.

So, I was shocked by the terrible motion artifacts I ran into when outputting the material in any size or format to use in Encore for making DVDs. No way Charilie! Lousy lousy lousy, aweful stuff when moving. Bad, Abobe, bad!

Here's the only "solution" I could find, but it gives lovely, final DVD output in 16x9 letter box format:

1. Ingest your 1440x1080i input, mix with whatever (SD DV, stills, titles, etc) and then output as a HUGE NON-INTERLACED 1440X1080 AVI. (7.5GB for 13 min.!) Better have space for this one!

2. Buy....(hey, don't freak out at that word!), beg, borrow, or steal (I'm kidding) a copy of TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress or something similar (yeah, right...FOR $99?) and input it into that program.

3. Output from TMPGEnc as an interlaced 720x480 MPEG (yourfile.mpg) with upper frame first.

4. Import that output into Encore (or whatever) and burn your DVD as normal


Presto! Lovely 16x9 DVD output, with ABSOLUTELY NO MOTION ARTIFACTS!

If someone can figure a way to do it without all that workflow (and you know what you're talking about) please share it. There are other forums too, waiting to hear your words of wisdom...

Stephen Armour - Lion Cub Productions (ABE) Brazil

[William N Zarvis]

I was under the impression TMPGEnc didn't like Adobe encoded AVIs? How did you get it to open the avi file?

[Graham Hickling]

Originally Posted by William N Zarvis

I was under the impression TMPGEnc didn't like Adobe encoded AVIs? How did you get it to open the avi file?

News to me! - both Plus and Xpress are working fine here...

[Stephen Armour]

Where did you get that impression?

They certainly seem to work fine together for me, though my AVI's are exported using Cineform's Aspect 4.1 plugin engine. It totally replaces the engine Adobe uses for that type of output (which is really from the same company I believe, only this plugin from them is much faster and optimized for multicore CPUs)

Stephen Armour - Lion Cub Productions (ABE) Brazil

[K. Forman]

I haven't really tried creating a letterboxed DVD, but I have done HDV straight with nothing more than PP2, 1 gig of ram, and an AMD 64 Athlon 3200. Captured, edited, and burned with nothing but PP2. Sure, it takes a bit for it to render the clips, but I'm used to stepping out for a smoke while rendering, whether it be 3D or video.

[Marco Wagner]

You keep saying HDV, so are you actually using an HDV cam, HD compatible hardware, and an HD-DVD burner to create this? Isn't 720X480 SD? I'm confus-ed.

[Jean Rousseau]

You know what guys,

I managed to get acceptable DVD quality with the compression of my final DVD mpeg files in vegas and then using architect. But I think theres no best solution yet. We're stuck in a world of not yet up to date editing software.(affordable I mean) to get the full quality of our HDV stuff on DVD. Lets just hope the next adobe premiere version will be more "workflow friendly" for exporting to DVD with Quality. Lets face it, HDV looks fabulous in the native format but when exported to DVD, its far from those DVDs we rent at blockbuster. How can a normal DVD look better than our HDV material??? Lets cross our fingers and wait for updated NLE that really support the HDV world.

[Chris Gerow]

Stephen,
Thanks for your post.........

I tried it out. The results seemed fine until I tried to build a DVD from the MPEG file produced by TMPGEnc. I used PP2.0 to burn a DVD and the color saturation knob got turned up to full. I don't know why this happens. I could tone it down in PP but this is covering up a problem and I would prefer to get to the hart of this mismatch.

Any ideas?

ChrisG

[Bill Ravens]

This will produce a widescreen NTSC compliant DVD. This will NOT produce an HDV file.

[Stephen Armour]

Hi Chris, sorry you're getting extra hassle. Seems to be the HD/HDV life.

Don't really know what's happening with your output, but note that I am NOT reimporting back into PP2, but doing the final DVD using Encore. There is definitely a difference, as I do not think PP actually works with MPG files directly, but makes a temp AVI wrapper for them. Something is going on with your temp files. If you can avoid reimporting back into PP2 and do it in another DVD build program, it might avoid prob's. Encore does not try to recompress or recompile the MPGs, but just writes them "as is" and points to them on the DVD.

Just to clarify something: these are obviously NOT HD DVD's! Just regular 'ole letterboxed 720x480 sized DVDs, but without motion artifacts. The only dif is that by using TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress, we can control how the fields go together and avoid seeing all those ugly stairsteps (or whatever you want to call them) when our video is displayed as NTSC interlaced. Plus we have the added advantage of output that looks like original SD video, even after all your special effects and transitions are done to it. That's one reason I use Cineform Aspect. Just like music, the higher the initial quality used for editing, the better the final output, even when down-rezed.

There are certainly other ways to do it, and you can also output directly from PP2 to DVD. It's just giving you much less control of your final output onto DVD.

There are many, many issues with HD/HDV capture to final output, but until the world goes to a single, unified system that is digital from end to end, and does not use compression or interlacing at any point from capture to final transmission, we're stuck with a mess. Just try to make the best of it and you'll still look pretty good to most people!

Sorry that doesn't help you really...

[Chris Barcellos]

Stephen:

I think the deinterlacing is the key. Instead of making an HDV non interlaced avi, however, I render as the second step, an DV .avi, from the HDV time line and get a pretty nice result. Have you tried that and compared results ?

[Ervin Farkas]

Chris, from other posts I gathered that PPRO does a terrible job at resizing the HDV footage... are you saying that you let PPRO resize from HDV to DV deinterlaced and you get good results?

[Stephen Armour]

Chris (Barcellos), absolutely it's the deinterlacing factor. And yes, I often do AVI's directly from the PP2 timeline for verification DVD's and have gotten quite good results.

However, with me, the issue was using those same AVI's to make a full menued DVD using Encore. That's really the reason I go back to making my own mpg's. Any high quality prog that does that would work. Since Encore re-compresses any AVI into an MPEG file for burning, I was often getting motion artifacts at that level. Using a mpg verified as good eliminates that prob.

I guess it's really a matter of controlling the whole process from start to finish for guaranteed results. Isn't that what Hollywood does too? Never leave anything to the whims of poor software...

[Don Blish]

I also use PPro2+AspectHD 4.x I have gotten good results by letting Cineform output a standard definition .avi for Encore to use...with one proviso: In the Cineform export setup, go to the "Keyframe" tab and change HDVs "Upper First" to "Sequential-no fields". That makes output 480p that is pleasant to watch on my 50" screen.

[Robert Garvey]

Originally Posted by Stephen Armour

....................
3. Output from TMPGEnc as an interlaced 720x480 MPEG (yourfile.mpg) with upper frame first.
.......................
Stephen Armour - Lion Cub Productions (ABE) Brazil

Stephen,

How long did it take for TMPGEnc to ingest and output your 13min, 7.5gig file?

I just want to know if I am doing something wrong, because it seems to take forever to do anything!

Cheers,
Robert