Maximizing HD to SD Quality

[Ron Evans]

A good down converter is VDub. This description is for Edius but substitute any NLE of your choice. Virtual Dub Tutorial for downscaling Edius HD to SD

Ron Evans

[Zachary Mattson]

Quick update, I changed the timeline settings from the dnxhd match to the NTSC Widescreen 24P, and kept the pixel aspect ratio to 1.000 square, and then rendered a wmv at 960x540 widescreen wmv at 9.8Mbps. It will be done when I get back from work, and I will let everyone know how it looks.

[Harry Simpson]

How'd it look?

[David Jasany]

I've completed several HD to SD projects and have noticed the quality issues noted in this thread. What render settings do you recommend for someone that just wants to use Vegas and can live with a minimal quaity hit? I have HD material and I need to produce a SD DVD.

Thanks,
Dave

[Edward Troxel]

Since you're resizing the video, the first thing to check is that you're rendering at BEST quality. The default is "Good" which is fine for most purposes. But when you're resizing frames/images, you need to change it to "Best" which uses a better (slower) algorithm for resizing images.

[Mark Williams]

I experimented around with this issue for about a month trying to get the best possible HD to SD conversion for a large DVD project. Although I am not a Vegas user (use Edius) I found the best solution was to render out a lossless file and encode with Tmpg4 using default DVD template settings. Encoded using CBR at 8100kps with AC3 audio and motion search set to high. The results, including graphics were razor sharp and crisp. I was amazed at this simple solution. Just download the trial and try it for yourself. I got the suggestion from Ron Evans in a post over on the Edius forum. http://ediusforum.grassvalley.com/fo...ad.php?t=16947

[David Jasany]

I've been using Best rendering for photo montages but not for video. Now that I have a much faster PC, I'll switch to Best for everything. When I have time I would like to give tmpg4 a try too.

[Brad Higerd]

Ron (and others) are spot on with the VDub solution. It's simple and FREE! And the resized footage from a 1080p Cineform master is beautiful (coming in at 720X405 to maintain original aspect ratio).

Love Vegas for many things; resizing video is not one of them.

Brad

[Hale Nanthan]

I am quite happy with the Pavtube Converter. It is easy to use and supports many different formats. Picture quality is very good for HD conversions, which is all I have used it for so far. As for speed and quality, I am satisfied though faster would always be better. It does what I want & at a reasonable price.

How to convert HD video to SD video?

[Matthew Long]

Originally Posted by Harry Simpson

Perrone don't shoot me! I'm close to being dangerous with this new knowledge. Couple more questions then i promise i'll figure out the rest.

So what i have so far is this:
1. Convert 1080 .MOV into 720 .AVI (take the lossy hit)
2. Edit video, add titles, cross fades, credits, whatever - finish content of movie.
3. Render in Vegas Studio to ? (.AVI again?)
4. Bring finished rendered .AVI into Virtualdub and resize (what size?) with Lanczos scaler.
5. Within Virtualdub, export a Lagarith or HuffYUV compressed AVI
6. Bring that into DVDA and select single movie and it will automatically convert it to a MP2 for DVD burn.

What am i missing?

Thank you for your patience
Harry

Hi Perrone,

I would appreciate if you could help me with my workflow from HD to SD using
Vegas 10 Pro, and Source Video from Canon 5d Mark II 1080p. I want the video
to be SD widescreen at the end of the process. Since I only have 4gig of
Ram, I can't load 1080p video on the timeline that is over 1.2 hours long,
so I decided to downgrade the video first,then import into vegas.

1. Open .MOV in VirutalDub to resize to 720x480 using Lanczos3.
Ex: http://www.lwintegrationtest.com/resize_vb.png

2. Compress .MOV file in VirtualDub using Lagarith

3. Import new 720x480 file to timeline in Vegas 10 Pro.

4. Set pixel to 1.00, set to progressive square in Vegas on the project/timeline level.
Ex: http://www.lwintegrationtest.com/Project_Properties.png
Ex: http://www.lwintegrationtest.com/Tim...ties_Media.png
Ex: http://www.lwintegrationtest.com/Tim...ies_VEvent.png

5. Render video .AVI in vegas using Lagarith.
Ex: http://www.lwintegrationtest.com/Render_Settings.png

6. Encode .AVI file to MPEG2 using Procoder, or CinemaCraft.


The following is details of my source file from the Canon 5D Mark II

General
Complete name : K:\Dvd Projects\Dorothy_Class_Reunion\Friday\MVI_0390.MOV
Format : MPEG-4
File size : 3.36 GiB
Overall bit rate : 47919470

Video
Count : 185
Count of stream of this kind : 1
Kind of stream : Video
Kind of stream : Video
Stream identifier : 0
ID : 1
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format/Url : VideoLAN - VideoLAN - x264
InternetMediaType : video/H264
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Codec ID/Url : http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/standalone.html
Codec : AVC
Codec/Family : AVC
Codec/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Codec/Url : VideoLAN - VideoLAN - x264
Codec/CC : avc1
Codec profile : Baseline@L5.0
Codec settings : 1 Ref Frames
Codec settings, CABAC : No
Codec_Settings_RefFrames : 1
Duration : 602602
Duration : 00:10:02.602
Bit rate mode : VBR
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 46380433
Bit rate : 46.4 Mbps
Width : 1920
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1080
Height : 1 080 pixels
Original height : 1088
Original height : 1 088 pixels
Pixel aspect ratio : 1.000
Display aspect ratio : 1.778
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Original display aspect ratio : 1.765
Original display aspect ratio : 16:9
Rotation : 0.000
Frame rate mode : CFR
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 29.970
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Frame count : 18060
Resolution : 8
Resolution : 8 bits
Colorimetry : 4:2:0
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Scan type : Progressive
Interlacement : PPF
Interlacement : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.746
Stream size : 3493621216
Stream size : 3.25 GiB (97%)


The following is my downgraded 720x480p from Virtual Dub using (lanczos3).

Count : 267
Video_Format_List : Lagarith
Complete name : K:\Dvd Projects\Dorothy_Class_Reunion\Friday\Video\Source
\MVI_0390_720_480.avi
Format : AVI
Codec/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 8.56 GiB
Duration : 10mn 2s
Overall bit rate : 122 Mbps
Stream size : 735481
Stream size : 718 KiB (0%)
Writing library : VirtualDub build 32817/release
Writing library : VirtualDub build 32817/release

Video
Count : 182
Kind of stream : Video
Format : Lagarith
Codec/Info : Lagarith LossLess
Codec/CC : LAGS
Duration : 10mn 2s
Duration : 00:10:02.603
Bit rate : 120 Mbps
Width : 720
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 480
Height : 480 pixels
Pixel aspect ratio : 1.000
Display aspect ratio : 1.500
Display aspect ratio : 3:2
Frame rate : 29.970
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Frame count : 18060
Standard : NTSC
Color space : RGB
Bit depth : 8
Bit depth : 8 bits
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 11.628
Stream size : 8.45 GiB (99%)


Questions

1. What should the correct Pixel aspect ratio be for 720x480p widescreen
NTSC?

2. I noticed the colorspace changed from YUV to RGB when I rendered out from
Virtual Dub. I'm wondering if this is why the color white in the video is
over exposed during playback on TV, but fine during playback on computer.

3. I also selected 16:9 within my encoder, and I see 3:2 instead of 16:9
according to mediainfo in the file from VitualDub, any ideas why?

3. What do I set Huffy to using this workflow?
http://www.lwintegrationtest.com/huffyuv.png

Thanks.
Matt

[Craig Longman]

Originally Posted by Matthew Long

1. What should the correct Pixel aspect ratio be for 720x480p widescreen
NTSC?

2. I noticed the colorspace changed from YUV to RGB when I rendered out from
Virtual Dub. I'm wondering if this is why the color white in the video is
over exposed during playback on TV, but fine during playback on computer.

3. I also selected 16:9 within my encoder, and I see 3:2 instead of 16:9
according to mediainfo in the file from VitualDub, any ideas why?

1) 1.2121 is the PAR for SD Widescreen, 0.9091 for normal.

2) If it converted to Computer RGB, then it will OK on a computer, depending on where you're playing it back. But when you encode with all but the 32 bit full-range setting in Vegas Pro, the codecs want to see Studio RGB for MPEG-2. If you can render to Studio RGB instead, or put a cRGB->sRGB filter in place somewhere, that will bring your blacks back to 16:16:16 and your whites down to 235:235:235.

3) 720x480 is 3:2, without the PAR adjustment. With it, the "rez" is 872x480, a bit wider that 16:9, but the sides are lost to overscan I guess. As I understand it, there is little to no decent/standard way of conveying PAR in AVI, so often the actual rez is changed to force the aspect ratio. 872x480, 720x396 or 640x360 to get AVIs to consistently playback correctly. The issue might be many players just ignore the PAR, I'm not honestly sure. Obviously though, this requires resampling, so it's NOT how to do the DVD or real output, only for an AVI for your computer or youtube or something.

[John Cattle]

I recently connected my Sony A1E to a neighbours Canon XHA1 through the firewire to try and down convert from HDV on the Sony down to DV on the Canon, for capture puposes. (Not realising that the Sony could do this all on its own)
Now the neighbours Canon will only playback DV and not HDV tapes - I've changed and rechanged the menu settings but with no luck.

Can anyone out there please help.
Best regards, John

[Robert M Wright]

Originally Posted by Matthew Long

2. I noticed the colorspace changed from YUV to RGB when I rendered out from
Virtual Dub. I'm wondering if this is why the color white in the video is
over exposed during playback on TV, but fine during playback on computer.

To export 4:2:2 YUV encoded with Lagarith, you need to tell VirtualDub to export YUY2 to the compressor and set Lagarith to encode as YUY2 (defaults for both are RGB).

To set VirtualDub to outputting YUY2: From "Video" on the menu bar, select "Color Depth..." and under "Output format to compressor/display", select "4:2:2 YCbCr (YUY2)".

To set Lagarith to encoding as YUY2: From "Video" on the menu bar, select "Compression..." then select "Lagarith lossless codec" then click the "Configure" button, and under mode select "YUY2".

Use YV12 (both as output from Virtual Dub to the compressor and as the Lagarith compression mode) if you want to export 4:2:0 from Virtual Dub (DVD video is 4:2:0).

[Troy Davis]

Hello,

I just installed vdub 1.9 and under VIDEO>compression I don't see anything about Lagarith.
Is there something I have to do to enable this?

Thanks!

[Uli Mors]

thats too much!

Too many steps to go,
too many formats to change
too much trouble
too much work.

I found that most resizers dont take care of too high frequencies - in worst case they mirror (Nyquist...) into the SD picture or produce moirees etc.
After hundreds of tries I simply edit in HD and play it (HD) back to XDCAM (even HDV works fine for this) and use the camera´s downconverter to play it back into PC via SDI or composite. The cam does the better downscale job than any of my softwares. Too high frequencies are filtered and the pic is nice, clean and without interlace (deinterlace) artefacts - especially in horizontal edges.

One ease way - maybe "oldschool", but always works.

Uli