I have a Z1. I shoot some test footage in 1080i. Gain turned off. Manual exposure. Shutter speed at 60. Flicker turned off. Steadyshot turned off. Camera is mounted on a tripod.

I capture into Premiere Pro 1.51 with no downconversion (Project set to HDV defaults). I take the clip and toss it in the time line and export the movie with the Cinepack codec.

When I look at the resultant footage it looks great. Until I pan. Even a slow gradual pan. No zooming. At that point I get these very nasty edge artifacts. The edges of everything look hideously jagged.

I have tried just letting the camera set the exposure and I get the same results.

Anyone have any pointers here for this?

If you're watching on a computer monitor, seeing jags is expected. Is that what you're doing? Convert the project properties to progressive for editing.

This is a much discussed topic around here....

I am not yet editing in HDV with my Z1, but I shot some 1080i footage the other day. Right now I'm looking at it on a Samsung 22" LCD widescreen monitor through the 1080i component video connection.

I have a long slow tripod mounted pan from a mountain top across a wilderness horizon that has pine trees in the foreground, and lots more pines vanishing off into the haze in the distance. This would seem like the kind of complex moving detail that others are saying HDV can't handle well.

It looks great on the monitor, I don't see any blocky breakups or interlace artifacts. Now my screen is 1280x720, so maybe that's why I don't see any problems? I'll need to upgrade to FCP 5 before I can easily capture HDV, and maybe that will reveal some problems that don't show through the component output.

Check that when you render that the source footage is set to upper field first.

Jim

If you're watching on a computer monitor, seeing jags is expected. Is that what you're doing? Convert the project properties to progressive for editing.

How do you mean? I am *blush* new to Premiere :)

Here is a section of a frame that illustrates the effect I am seeing:


http://www.netnance.com/Z1.jpg

That is the edge of a picture frame that I panned past.

Seeing such a tiny postage stamp sized image out of context doesn't tell me much. But that appears to be the normal results of shooting motion with an interlaced camera, and not anything related to the Z1 or MPEG2 compression.

This webpage discusses interlaced images in SD, but the principles should be the same: http://www.100fps.com/

OK, I changed that pic so that you can see the picture frame better. And this is with a slow pan - very slow. If I take the component output of the camera and play the tape into my HDTV it looks steallar.

Go to Export Movie, select Settings, Keyframe and Rendering, and be sure that Upper Field First is selected in the Rendering Options

It is, Jim. Has been all along.

Shaughan,

Is there any chance you're looking at this via firewire on your HDTV and it looks messed up?

Right after I bought my Z1 and used Premiere Pro 1.51 I discovered that anything I edited, then rendered back to the Z1 and played HDV Firewire out into my HDTV set had the fields reversed. But, if I played it back via component analog, the fields were fine.

Turns out that Adobe had a bug in a DLL file that, even though the fields were written to the tape in the correct order (upper first), one of the bits in the firewire header was mistakently left to lower (DV and SD material). So, the result was even though the material had the correct field order the TV was "told" to reverse it when using HD firewire.

I got a new DLL to test and it was fine. I can only assume they silently changed the 1.51 upgrade package with the fix.

Anyway, just curious if that was your problem.

Anyway, that's obviously just standard, ordinary everyday interlace artifacts. Play it in a program which deinterlaces and you won't see those lines anymore (though pans may appear to stutter as you lose half of your temporal resolution unless the program is smart enough to display both fields at twice the normal frame-rate).

I was using the component out to look at it on my HDTV (where it looked great). I am going to shoot a bunch of SD footage tonight on DVCAM and then bring that into Premiere. The output that I need to generate is a QT file for the web and finally a DVD. I dont really need HD at the moment. I just started playing with it last night after I figured out to set the driver for the AV/C Subunit to the Sony D-VHS driver.

One thing I hate about Premiere is that it only lets you burn DVD - I cant create menus and other content (that I am aware of). It would be nice if it just output content that I could bring into a DVD authoring package to build the menus and then burn that to DVD - But that is a topic for another thread. Don't want to de-rail my own thread here :)

Any tips on outputting a high quality QT file for the web would be greatly appreciated though. And any tips on capture as well :)

Thanks everyone for all of your help here. I GREATLY appreciate it!

Shaughan.

Unless it HAS to be Qt, you will get far better results in WM9.

WM9 - Do you reccommend a particular codec for outputting to WM9? Or just the standard Microsoft one?

I am using the settings on the microsoft site.
If you want to use QT look for daniel's postings on VideoUniversity.
Anyway, for the web, I use WM9, variable or constant (doesn't make much difference), full frame rate, 1/4 or 1/3 movie size, between 768-1500 bitrate, 100 quality. I am just starting to test 1280x720 for dvd. Cineform has some pointers on their site. I think the bitrate has to be 7000-10,000 depending on movie dimensions. One good thing about using WM is that you can import that file into After Effects and twiddle the sharpness and colour so it looks as good as the original.

Thanks for all of the help everyone. I actually got stellar results after trying the trial version of the converter at http://www.dvdxdv.com/HDVxDVsite/Tutorials/converting.to.quicktime.htm for the Mac.

Have not really tried the WM9 thing yet. It's frustrating to me that I have to be some kind of an engineer to figure all of this out. I am an artist and photographer that wants to do video. Just wish it was a bit simpler. I know - If it was easy, anyone could do it :)

Well I tried the WM9 codec last night and finally got very good results. I did an A/B compare against the H.264 HD codec for QT and the H.264 beat it hands down both in terms of output quality and files size. And after a lot of futzing around I did get FCP to use compressor to output H.264 encoded files with quality that rivals the component image from my HDTV. WM9 will have to do until Apple gets the QT7 final out for Windows.

My only complaint with QT on Windows has been that STUPID nag to upgrade to QT pro. But that's another story entirely :)

Again, my thanks to all here that provided guidance on this. This is a great community. Getting this done was a huge burden off of me as I had to have a level of confidence in the quality of the output that I could produce from the Z1.

Getting this done was a huge burden off of me as I had to have a level of confidence in the quality of the output that I could produce from the Z1.

JVC claims that starting next month they'll support playback of full-quality HDV files on standard DVDs using their new SRDVD-100U player, which is apparently an updated version of the Avel Linkplayer2. If this is true it would offer another good option for affordable HD distribution, although you'd be limited to about 20-30 minutes of HDV on a single-layer disc.

I've been happy with the quality I get with Windows Media HD using Canopus Procoder Express to do the encoding, and Windows Media appears to be the best choice for now for computer-based HD playback. One problem with H.264 is that the recommended hardware for computer playback (per Apple) is unrealistic for the PC platform, so Windows Media is more practical in that sense.

It will be interesting to see how all the delivery options shape up next year when blue-laser HD DVD players start shipping, and we can compare trade-offs of various options in terms of encoding times, storage requirements, disc and hardware costs and so on.

The HD format wars seem to be leaning towards blu-ray (thank god).

see http://www.hdforindies.com for some observations on this.

Hooray, HD for Indies! I never get tired of seeing that link. Reminds me, I need to run up to Austin to check in on Mike sometime soon. As for Blu-Ray, I'm all for whatever it takes to avoid a long, drawn-out and protracted format war.

One thing seems clear for me;
HD at its current best (1080) is VERY reasonably serviced by WMV ( and will be by H2-264 ) at bit rates of 9MBps.

These rates are PERFECTLY sustainable on TODAY's DVDs. The only point is you need a WMV enabled ( or H264 enabled) DVD player, exactly as you have DIVX enabled players.

These platforms are coming, one of the first ones being commented here
http://www.movietrack.net/articles/news/37.html

Therefore it looks perfectly clear to me that the ONLY reason to push every body to higher density DVDs and higher Bandwith Reader is the need to push new hardware down the pipe , as well as to establish a new technical base to (try to ) restore content protection.

From the general public standpoint , all of this is sheer waste . It is all about re-creating a Copyright environment, and not about providing higher quality video, which can be supported by today's hardware with these new codecs around.