Letterboxed miniDV ---> Anamorphic DVD - When Better is not Good Enough

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Level 4

3,047 points

Letterboxed miniDV ---> Anamorphic DVD - When Better is not Good Enough

Hi, it's me again, quietly cursing the DP who shot my project in letterboxed SD.
Thanks to Hanumang and Ken Stone, I was able to convert the DVD project to anamorphic,
by slicing off the top and bottom 30 lines, and setting the anamorphic flag throughout.
It creates a much better impression nice and wide, instead of with wasted black pixels
on all four sides.

After many hours of compressing, using Better resizing and Better deinterlacing
in Compressor's Frame Controls, I realize that the anamorphisized footage (720x404)
doesn't look as good as the original letterboxed footage (720x480) when you zoom in.
There is stairstepping and a general fuzziness as a result of the process.

When I set the deinterlacing to Best, I get an anamorphic image that looks as good
as the original letterboxed, just bigger, which is cool; but it would take about 160 hours
to process my DVD. Yikes! I guess there's no free lunch.

Or is there?

MacBook Pro 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.4.11), Quicktime 7.5.5, FCP 6.0.5, Shake 4.1.1

Posted on Apr 13, 2009 8:16 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 13, 2009 8:22 AM in response to stuckfootage

Garbage in, garbage out. If you had actually shot your video as 16:9, you wouldn't need to "fix" this, which is causing a loss in resolution. A work around is always going to provide a "lesser" solution than doing it right in the first place. Your choice at this point is to live with it, or re-shoot.

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Answer 2

stuckfootage Author

Level 4

3,047 points

Apr 13, 2009 10:25 AM in response to Shawn Birmingham

It's funny. I shoot a my own stuff in HD. All the paying gigs I get are miniDV. Sigh.
Shawn, thanks for the GIGO comment, but I can't get them to reshoot this project.

In conclusion, I guess one could say, that if a project MUST be shot 16:9 on miniDV,
the options are, from better to worse:

BEST-rent an anamorphic lens, edit and author in anamorphic

BETTER-shoot letterbox progressive (no need for time-consuming BEST deinterlacing),
edit letterbox, compress and author in anamorphic

OK-shoot letterbox interlaced, edit and author letterbox interlaced.

BAD-shoot letterbox interlaced, edit letterboxed interlaced, compress and author
progressive anamorphic. (BETTER interlacing looks bad, BEST takes forever)

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Answer 3

hanumang

Level 6

9,250 points

Apr 13, 2009 10:35 AM in response to stuckfootage

stuckfootage wrote:
After many hours of compressing, using Better resizing and Better deinterlacing
in Compressor's Frame Controls, I realize that the anamorphisized footage (720x404)
doesn't look as good as the original letterboxed footage (720x480) when you zoom in.
There is stairstepping and a general fuzziness as a result of the process.

Where are you getting the 720x404 figure from? QuickTime Player? And this is when playing your .mov file or your .m2v file?

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Answer 4

stuckfootage Author

Level 4

3,047 points

Apr 13, 2009 11:07 AM in response to hanumang

hanumang wrote:
Where are you getting the 720x404 figure from? QuickTime Player? And this is when playing your .mov file or your .m2v file?

Looking at the original export from FCP (current settings),
QuickTime Player shows that it's 720x480.

If I just convert it to .m2v without anamorphizing, QuickTime Player shows that it's 640x480.

Using your advice (crop 60 top and bottom) to convert letterbox to anamorphic,
in QuickTime Player, I get an .mov file that's 853x480. When I convert that file to .m2v,
QuickTime Player shows that it's 720x404.

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Answer 5

hanumang

Level 6

9,250 points

Apr 13, 2009 11:22 AM in response to stuckfootage

Thanks for the clarification - I was afraid there was an issue (wrong frame size) with the anamorphic transcode. Lord knows things can get screwy (I had one colleague create square pixel .mov files at 720x404) 🙂

So you're seeing the softness (stairstepping, etc) all throughout the transcode/encode chain? If that's a yes, you might gain a little something from setting Details and Anti-aliasing (when going from Letterbox to Anamorphic) to 10 and 5, respectively. Of course, suit to taste; if you're working with material with lots of motion or high detail, you might have to go a little higher (but keep the 2:1 ratio to avoid too much haloing). Also - this is rare - but sometimes it helps to manually set the Field Dominance in the Frame Controls.

If you're working with Compressor 3, Best can make a difference but it simply takes way too long for any non-Mac Pro, as you've seen.

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Answer 6

stuckfootage Author

Level 4

3,047 points

Apr 13, 2009 8:08 PM in response to hanumang

Thanks again for your help. Setting Details and Anti-Aliasing to 30 and 15 helped quite a bit,
but the bottom line is that the original pixels look better. Without a huge time investment,
deinterlacing and resizing is just going to soften and add artifacts.

So, practically speaking, I may just make the DVD letterboxed. If the original footage were
HD 16:9 that would be sad, but since it was shot that way, it seems to be the sharpest solution.
To paraphrase OJ Simpson, what is shot letterboxed, stays letterboxed.

Yours for Pixel Purity,
LEs

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