Hd->sd

[Uli Mors]

First , I am a totally well experienced Vegas user for years now (since Vegas 4.0).

Working on a masterpiece for german television I again run into its limits (?).

I have very HQ , fine detailed HD Material (XDCAM HD422 & 420) that needs to be converted into SD.
For my normal projects I simply set render as to DV AVI or IMX MXF and render it with "best" settings, "interpolate" in project setting.

I always found horizontal or vertical lines to be very "flickery" as a result of the downscaling. It looks like Vegas does not deinterlace the HD Material properly before resizing.

What is your best HQ approach to this?

If needed, I can provide some raw shots in HD via my server, so you can test it.

Thanks

Uli

[Randall Leong]

Uli,

The problem is not just the deinterlacing; it's the resizing alogarithm itself. Vegas (and most other NLEs) do not use the proper resize alogarithms. They do a poor job at resizing interlaced content.

[Marc Salvatore]

I edit and render my final AVI using Cineform 1920x1080. I then do my downscaling and MPEG-2 encoding in TMPEG and I'm very happy with the results. TMPEG use Lanzcos-3 downscaling which is supposed to be the best.

[Rainer Listing]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

Uli,

The problem is not just the deinterlacing; it's the resizing alogarithm itself. Vegas (and most other NLEs) do not use the proper resize alogarithms. They do a poor job at resizing interlaced content.

And no better with progressive content. You get a much better result with the free AVsynth and VirtualDub. Another thing you might try is adding a one pixel gaussian blur to some scenes before you downsize - the blur is not evident on the downsized version and it could reduce the flickering.

[Uli Mors]

I never used cineform - there are different versions on their website... what package do I need at least ror trying?

Thanks

Uli

[Mike Kujbida]

Take a look at the http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-hap...d-quality.html thread as this was discussed at great length with several excellent suggestions.

[Marc Salvatore]

Originally Posted by Uli Mors

I never used cineform - there are different versions on their website... what package do I need at least ror trying?

Thanks

Uli

I'm using Neo HD. This has the added feature of First Light which is real time color correction on a metadata level. Cineform Neo Scene is the more economical way to go but has some limitations. I like to upsample my HDV to full HD and I am not sure if Neo Scene allows that. I know it works fine for AVCHD.

Also I don't think you have to use Cineform to get better DVD files. I would just export in whatever file format you use and try out TMPEG for the downscaling and encoding. There is a Sony Codec included in Vegas which some people seem to prefer to Cineform.

Marc