Exporting DV & HDV footage for DVD

Question

Level 1

0 points

Exporting DV & HDV footage for DVD

I have footage of a wedding I shot with both a Sony TRV 900 DV camcorder and a Sony HVR-V1U HDV camcorder with HD footage recorded on to an HVR-DR60 hard drive. I converted the HDV video in MPEG Streamclip using ProRess 422 so that I can then import it into FCP 6.02 along with the DV footage on the same timeline. Footage from the V1U was captured using the 24p mode. Conversion from m2v format into .mov via MPEG Streamclip was directly via the HVR-DR60 hard drive. My final output is to standard DVD and 16:9. I don't care that the DV footage with have black bars on left & right sides to do this. My 1st question is what timeline settting should I use in FCP? Second, when viewing the footage on my Samsung 1080p via firewire, the quality of the HDV video is severely compromised by the horizontal interlaced lines and poor video quality. The DV footage is fine. I believe I had the timeline set to DV-NTSC Anamorphic. What is the best method for being able to export the HDV footage to standard DVD quality for viewing on 1080p TVs and not having such poor video quality? I know that de-interlacing the video is not an option as that degrades the quality even more. This is a problem I have been trying to figure out since December and addressing it off and on as I can get to it, but I finally throwing in the towel and posting. I hope I explained my issue well enough. Thanks.

mac pro, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Mar 9, 2008 1:54 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Drew13

Level 6

12,387 points

Mar 9, 2008 9:17 AM in response to lurchtt

lurchtt wrote:
The DV footage is fine. I believe I had the timeline set to DV-NTSC Anamorphic.

There are alot of things going on in there with conversions and timelines where quality can be taking a hit.

FWIW Final Cut 6 lets you place different formats (DV and HDV) on the same timeline, so in general you did not have to do as much conversion as you did, though other codecs may be easier than HDV. The newest version of Compressor (though a bit buggy) does a nice job of converting things if you need to convert them.

DV-NTSC (with a DV Codec and also frame rate) can give you a quality hit. The conversion from HDV to the .mov could give you a quality hit. The timeline could be giving you a quality hit. And how you exported for use on the DVD can give you a quality hit.

What you may want to do, as a start, is set up a timeline for the Sony HVR-V1U HDV and place one of the "bad" sections in that timeline. A minute or two should suffice. Then export the timeline using Compressor for an SD DVD. Take one of the 16:9 presets (try "Best" with the shortest running time option from the Apple presets), make a copy of it, and in the frame controls set the options to "Better" and burn that to a DVD and play it back. It should look good.

Anyway I use a few approaches on the workflow when mixing things and use different things at different times. On some recent projects (not mixing 24P, just DV and HDV, and some others here can offer more insight on 24P issues than I can) I have bought the mixed items into 6.02 HDV timeline and adjusted the DV to fit 16:9 and send the timeline out. Though the DV does not look quite as good as the HDV, it is far from horrible or poor. You could also use a DV sized timeline and drop and scale the HDV down to that. How much is shot one way or the other? If 2 hours is HDV and 15 minutes is DV, for instance, I would probably lean towards the HDV side of things.

Reply