Converting 60i to 24p

[Ruben Pla]

Hi,

Does anyone know if it's possible to render 60i Widescreen footage, in Vegas 5, into 24p Widescreen without it coming out blurry?

I tried rendering it with 2-3 pulldown and 2-3-3-2 pulldown and it comes out blurry. The reason I need to do it is that I have to render my whole project as one piece and I have a 60i segment sandwiched between the rest of the film that's shot as 24p Widescreen.

Anyone know what I can do?

Thank you,

Ruben

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Blurry? Or with motion blur? Motion blur is *gonna* happen no matter what when you go from 60i to 24p. It pretty well has to, or you're going to see disjointed movement. If you can post a still so we can better get an idea of what you're seeing?
If you're shooting 60i and not managing the camera as though it was 24p, I'd expect to see a lot of motion blur. You've got to manage the camera as 24p if you want decent 24p output, even though you don't have a 24p cam.

[Ruben Pla]

Douglas,

It is definitely "blurry", not "motion blur", as the whole scene is that way, not just when there's motion.

Also, it is a 24p camera. It's the Panasonic DVX-100A. The whole film, except one scene was shot as 24p Anamorphic Widescreen. One scene, in the middle of the film, was shot by a different DP, who was not as familiar with the camera, and had the setting as 60i Widescreen. There is my problem. How do I render the 60i scene as 24p in a single project so there's no "blur" in the one scene?

Thank you,

Ruben

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

If I'm understanding you correctly, the 60i shows no blur when viewed in 60i, but it shows blur when viewed in 24p? Unless you're looking at a 60i clip in a 23.97 project, and haven't prerendered or rendered it to Best yet, so you can see what it actually looks like. It's possible you're seeing the resample during preview, but once you render, this goes away.
Does this help narrow it down?
If there is blur in the 60i, it will only appear worse in 24p. If it is a sharp image in 60i, it should appear sharp but contain motion blur in 24p.

[Ruben Pla]

The original 60i footage is clear. It is only blurry after I render it as 24p. It's blurry in the preview, as it's rendering, and it's blurry in the final rendered scene as 24p.

What do you think?

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

I think something is seriously messed up, somewhere.
What happens when you convert that 60i clip to 24p in a separate project and then insert that clip into your 24p project?

[Ruben Pla]

When I do that, the scene looks blurry on the timeline, and then when I render the whole project as 24p Widescreen, that scene is still blurry.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Perhaps if you post a still of the 60i, then post the same frame as a 24p render, it might help us track down the issue.

[Ruben Pla]

Douglas,

Unfortunately, it says at the bottom left, in the "Posting Rules", that I can't post attachments, even though in my profile I selected, "Show Images (including attached images and images in [IMG] code)." Is there a way to attach photos that I'm not aware of?

Ruben

[Ruben Pla]

Douglas,

I couldn't send you an attachment here so I emailed the two photos to:

info / at/ sundancemediagroup /dot/ com

I hope you got it.

Ruben

[Ruben Pla]

Well, for some reason, now I can send attachments, so here they are.

Ruben

[David Jimerson]

That looks like a pretty typical conversion, Reuben.

[Ruben Pla]

Unfortunately, then I can't use the conversion if I'm going to lose that much resolution (it's very noticeable if one clicks on those icons and sees it blown up...and especially noticeable when I render the whole project together and view it on a DVD.)

So, I guess what I have to do is what I was trying to solve earlier...to leave the 60i footage as a separate segment form the 24p footage (with a little Vegas "Magic Bullet" look added in...which makes it look quite nice, actually.) But then I still have the problem that, when I go to DVDA2, and if I put them in as three separate segments, then if I use the "End Action", I'll get pauses between the segments...and if I use the "Music Compilation" (which works pretty good, as far as no pauses) I get the single black frame between the second and third segments.

Thinking about it now, I'm thinking that the black frame comes between the 2nd segment (which is the smaller 60i scene) and the third segment (which is the very large 24p rest of the film segment), but there's no black frame between the 1st very large 24p segment and the smaller 60i segment. Could that be because DVDA2 is pausing to read the upcoming info from the large 24p segment, and that gives it the black frame...and yet there's no black frames between the 1st and 2nd segment because the 60i scene is much smaller (only 6 minutes) and then it's read much quicker?

What do you think?

(Sorry for the long message. I just wanted to get all the information out there. Thank you.)

[David Jimerson]

To be honest, I really don't see that much of a difference. Where are you seeing the really objectionable areas?

It's a tiny bit less sharp, but you might be able just to put a little bit of a sharpening mask on it.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Ruben, it's SD, it's not going to stand being blown up very well anyway.
As David mentioned, it looks perfectly normal to me.
You might try unsharp masking, and denoising...