I need it to look like home video. This is extremely detailed architectural footage presented in documentary format. It is used by construction professionals and inspectors to verify very complex systems that are now covered up by sheetrock and other materials. Shallow DOF not welcome.Originally Posted by nxb
Oh, and yes, it makes me a lot of money. This is my first project in HD, though.
Oh yeah. CBR is just through-putting, VBR is thinking. I usually estimate two times as long for VBR. Did you try a sample of quality slider at default vs max? I'm curious. I know Bob Sanders is happy with it maxed out but I've found the resulting video to be over-processed and less "organic" (copyright Video_Frank, 2009).
Why don't you try a ten second clip first? You're wasting a lot of time if DVDA has to re-render. Good luck, CW.
Yeah, that's what I figured. Is there really any benefit to using VBR on video shot with a moving camera? I mean, it isn't likely to be using the lower bit rates since everything in the frame is constantly changing.Yeah, I liked the look of the 31 file better. Minimal, but noticeable.Did you try a sample of quality slider at default vs max? I'm curious. I know Bob Sanders is happy with it maxed out but I've found the resulting video to be over-processed and less "organic" (copyright Video_Frank, 2009).
Yeah, I'll do a couple of loop renders and burn them to a BD-RE. Stay tuned...Why don't you try a ten second clip first? You're wasting a lot of time if DVDA has to re-render. Good luck, CW.
OT:
I believe that's a good decision. In my opinion, the 24p / 25p / very shallow DOF look is way overused nowadays. It's a nice effect, yes, and i use it often too if the style calls for it, but come on, not every project needs to look like an artsy student film.***
50i / 60i has "authenticity" and "realism", the feel of actually being there, the feel of the footage being documentation instead of fabrication. Many, many projects benefit from this more than from a "film look", which distances the wiever from the subject, puts the wiever in the "i'm watching fiction" mood.
Both have their uses.
*** Yes, student film. The real Hollywood movies do not have a shallow DOF, they have a controlled DOF. And in most cases, that is actually pretty deep compared to the footage we see from people with video DSLR's or 35mm adapters. The DOF craze has gone to the absurd length of people blaming actual Hollywood blockbusters for having a "home video look". Is that silly or what?
Last edited by Halsu; 2009 October 10th at 05:32.
*Balanced audio hack* *Variable ND filters* *HV20 vs. Film* "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." (George Orwell: Animal Farm)
There's very likely a benefit, but not necessarily a big one. VBR of course is most efficient when there's both calm and fast paced footage to assign quality settings to...
*Balanced audio hack* *Variable ND filters* *HV20 vs. Film* "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." (George Orwell: Animal Farm)
Just to clear up any misguided BD resolution / frame rate claims.....I did a test disk a few months back and this is what I've found:
Works correctly on my Panasonic BD-35:
1280 x 720p @ 24fps
1280 x 720p @ 30fps
1280 x 720p @ 60fps
1440 x 1080i
1920 x 1080i
1920 x 1080p @ 24fps
1920 x 1080p @ 30fps
Does not work correctly on my Panasonic BD-35:
1920 x 1080p @ 60fps
My tests with DVDA will only accept 1080i without wanting to re-encode. Even then, it can be a hit or miss situation from time to time. I wish there was a Reg Hack that would disable DVDA from wanting to Re-Encode some of my compliant BD clips. Hopefully someone much smarter than me can figure it out.
I would love for a company like DVD-Lab to come out with an advanced Blu-Ray authoring app that would never re-encode clips. They would expect you to import compliant and correctly encoded clips. DVDA would be great if it would allow you to switch OFF re-encoding. To bad it's designed for the average idiot.
Last edited by racer-x; 2009 October 10th at 06:36.
There is no such thing as "Idiot-Proof".........a good Idiot will get around that every time.
Sure, the "controlled depth of field" look has its uses. For me, though, the biggest things I've learned here that have really upped my game are:
- use 100% zebra to adjust exposure to prevent blown whites.
- Eugenia's slow motion tutorial - mucho work, fabulous results.
- set white balance manually every time.
- AAV Colourlab to set the black and white levels.
- using intermediate codecs to save clips for later use.
Sure, they're home movies but I've been getting rave reviews on some of the work I've done lately - without ever once needing the shallow dof look.
I hear ya Video Frank.....controlled dept of field is an artistic attribute that I take full advantage of in still photography with my DSLR's. Like you, I mostly shoot sports where content is king. That calls for 60i @ high shutter speeds as allowed by available light.
Speeking of slow motion, It's hard to beat Avisynth / mvtools. I don't consider it difficult, but that's also relevant. Here's a test slow-mo on an old AVCHD clip from a Panasonic SD-! I downloaded a few years back:
[ame="http://vimeo.com/6989762"]Slow-mo test with MVtools2 on Vimeo[/ame]
There is no such thing as "Idiot-Proof".........a good Idiot will get around that every time.
I've got a lot of respect for the great slo-mo work you & Lance do. However, I've been editing digital video for 8 years now and, to be honest, I'm happy to do all my work in Vegas and avoid the multiple tools needed by your methods. I'm doing four hockey games a week now so I need a method that is quick and repeatable. Basically, I drag all the game clips to the timeline, set the project properties to 60 fps progressive, interpolated and render out the highlights to an intermediate codec. When I've got enough footage, I slo-mo them and compile a montage video. Eugenia's method yields better results than using a simple velocity envelope so it's worth the effort.
Regardless, I'm appreciative of the effort you put in here and I enjoy watching your footage.
>Just to clear up any misguided BD resolution / frame rate claims.....
>1920 x 1080p @ 30fps
Different players may have different results, but what's in the spec is what matters. Anything else, is a crapshoot and to be avoided. If the spec doesn't say that it can do something, then cheaper players will simply not do it. So burning 1080/30p BDs for friends, is highly discouraged, because you don't know what kind of a BD player they got.
I'm not partial to DOF, I'm just partial to PF24. 60i from the HV20 (and probably any cam) looks like a consumer video. If you need realistic video or fast motion then that is what you have to use. No fault there.
If you made a movie at 60i people would go wtf. Overuse DOF and you look like a student film. I don't even have a DOF adapter, its too expensive for what it does. I'd rather do it in after effects for the few times I need it.
OK, so I did some more testing today and I settled on rendering with CBR set at 25mbps with the quality slider set to 31. There was no appreciable PQ difference using VBR and 2-passes, but the render times were more than double for the same file. I'm now rerendering all my clips properly and they look way better than what I was doing before. The few test clips I tried in DVDA did not rerender. Yay! Thanks for all the help guys and gals, much appreciated.
BTW, how many burns do you think you can get out of a BD-RE disc before it is no longer reliable? I've had one fail after about 10 reburns, but I don't know if that was what caused it or if I damaged it by leaving it lying around on my desk.
If you intentionally encode 60i source incorrectly as 30p do you see interlace combing when you play it back on the blu-ray player? What if 60i source is incorrectly encoded as 24p? Is it played back at 80% speed with visible interlace combing?
That's what I was doing and all I noticed was some slight motion blur and loss of PQ, no interlacing artifacts whatsoever.
Congratulations CycleWriter on correcting your problem..........
Eugenia is correct (as usual) in that 30p is not officially supported in BD specs. I did a test disk just as an experiment because I was curious. I was surprised to see it play on my BD player. No guarantee that it will play on all players, so I wouldn't use it for distribution.
ejolson wrote:
Don't know, I've never done either. If you mean taking Frame Mode footage like the 30p shot by HV30/40 and encoding it as progressive, then it should play fine. If it's truly interlaced, then I would imagine that bluray player would read the header and assume it's progresive. I could only imagine it would be like playing on a PC monitor, but I've never tested it so can't confirm.If you intentionally encode 60i source incorrectly as 30p do you see interlace combing when you play it back on the blu-ray player? What if 60i source is incorrectly encoded as 24p? Is it played back at 80% speed with visible interlace combing?
If you took 60i (29.97 fps) clip and told the encoder to encode as 23.976, then the encoder would probably drop some frames. You could manually change the playback rate to slow the footage down by 80% if you wanted to. The same goes for the audio so that they will be in sync. Easy enough to do in Avisynth.
But what's the point, unless you have a good reason to........
There is no such thing as "Idiot-Proof".........a good Idiot will get around that every time.
A 60i test clip incorrectly encoded as 30p can be used to verify that a blu-ray player HDTV combination can display 1080p30 as full frame progressive. In particular, the ability to display full progressive frames is confirmed by the presence of interlace combing when the test clip is viewed. Using this technique I can confirm the Panasonic BD70 correctly plays 1080p30 source from blu-ray using full progressive frames.
While it's true 1080p30 is not part of the blu-ray standard
http://www.hv20.com/showthread.php?p=250684#post250684
it seems that 1080p30 is correctly played by some blu-ray players. I wonder which players have trouble with it?
Last edited by ejolson; 2009 October 11th at 01:20.
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