Martin Chab
August 4th, 2009, 05:51 AM
A couple of weeks ago i finished a short film and prepared myself for the HD to SD conversion to make DVDs. Iīm saying i prepared myself because the movie have some particularities:
It is a single 5 minutes shot where the camera never stop moving
Have a lot of very fine details and lots of patterns (bricks, meshes, small graffitties, etc)
Have very high saturation overall
The movie was made mixing animation, cg, filming, etc with lots of compositing
Since no one frame was identical to the next or previous frame (not even a single pixel) i knew that the compressor was going to have hard time making an mpeg for the DVD.
I made the first version using compressor with the highest quality settings and the result was.... impossible to watch....sooo bad.
So decided to get a solution i started to conduct some tests. I tried:
Converting and resampling (resize) in AE and then compressing
Making all at once in AE
Making an SD timeline in FCS, dropping the HD comp inside and compressing from there
The same with Premiere
I tried at least 10 diverse compression softwares at diverse studios including: BitVice, Episode Pro, Adobe media Encoder etc, etc, etc playing with the parameters in each but the result was far from good.
Finally i tried Hc encoder HC Encoder (http://www.videohelp.com/tools/HC) a freeware software that uses avisynth as the engine and the result was....astonishing....soo good that i couldn't believe!!!
I called a friend (filmmaker too) and when i said that the result was like night and day i could see the doubt on his expression: "Martin, you are exaggerating" but when he saw the result...WOW, it is exactly like that....night and day
The image is so crisp, the details are all there (it was the only compressor to retain the small letters readable), the colors too, the noise almost non visible (the original have no noise at all since most of the film is animated but the compressors created tons of noise),
and as a plus the compression was like 10 times faster that any other software.
Now the question is...how come? how is that possible that a small freeware makes a way much better job than a 1000 USD soft?
I truly recommend you to give it a try and see for yourself.
It is a single 5 minutes shot where the camera never stop moving
Have a lot of very fine details and lots of patterns (bricks, meshes, small graffitties, etc)
Have very high saturation overall
The movie was made mixing animation, cg, filming, etc with lots of compositing
Since no one frame was identical to the next or previous frame (not even a single pixel) i knew that the compressor was going to have hard time making an mpeg for the DVD.
I made the first version using compressor with the highest quality settings and the result was.... impossible to watch....sooo bad.
So decided to get a solution i started to conduct some tests. I tried:
Converting and resampling (resize) in AE and then compressing
Making all at once in AE
Making an SD timeline in FCS, dropping the HD comp inside and compressing from there
The same with Premiere
I tried at least 10 diverse compression softwares at diverse studios including: BitVice, Episode Pro, Adobe media Encoder etc, etc, etc playing with the parameters in each but the result was far from good.
Finally i tried Hc encoder HC Encoder (http://www.videohelp.com/tools/HC) a freeware software that uses avisynth as the engine and the result was....astonishing....soo good that i couldn't believe!!!
I called a friend (filmmaker too) and when i said that the result was like night and day i could see the doubt on his expression: "Martin, you are exaggerating" but when he saw the result...WOW, it is exactly like that....night and day
The image is so crisp, the details are all there (it was the only compressor to retain the small letters readable), the colors too, the noise almost non visible (the original have no noise at all since most of the film is animated but the compressors created tons of noise),
and as a plus the compression was like 10 times faster that any other software.
Now the question is...how come? how is that possible that a small freeware makes a way much better job than a 1000 USD soft?
I truly recommend you to give it a try and see for yourself.