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I would transcode everything to ProRes. During the edit, it would be nice to be able to view what you’re cutting on a large external monitor or projector. I’m currently using the Matrox MXO2 Mini IO box along with a 50′ Plasma. It makes color correcting a bit easier since you can somewhat calibrate an external (consumer) monitor using the Matrox preferences. It also makes it really easy to judge if something is out of focus, or how graphics fall apart when blown up.

I would still edit in HD, then downconvert at the end to SD. That way you still have the HD master if ever needed down the road. For some of the best MPEG-2 encoding for high quality finishing, I’d be looking at BitVice http://www.innobits.com/bitvice.html

Hi Harry:
An excellent point that I have not considered. Here is the total setup for both you and Guy. I am using footage from both a Sony EX-1 (29.97) and a Canon EOS 7D ( 24P footage). The goal is to get this video to a regular DVD. I don’t really know Apple’s DVD authoring program, so I usually use iDVD. It seems to have worked well in the past. I have been converting things lately to 24P and keeping my original footage. In other words, making a copy of the original footage then converting in Cinetools. Generally, my stuff looks fine. This is the first time since getting the 7D that the finished product will be projected on a big screen (500 folks at Hilton for the event). The good news is I have not put the first clip into any timeline. So as of right now, It just have the raw footage. If you all could take me through the setup from timeline to finished DVD, I would be greatly appreciated. I don’t want to go through all the shooting and effort to have a product I am not proud of.
Thanks in advance.

And don’t mix fraaammm…

> I am using footage from both a Sony EX-1 (29.97) and a Canon EOS 7D ( 24P
>footage)

uh oh. Frankly, the 24p to 60i conversion is pretty obvious, especially on non interlaced mediums. Why? Because if you add a pulldown, an LCD does not display interlacing the way a CRT does, so it looks more stroby. 60 to 24p isn’t great either. Your best bet is to run it through Compressor and hopefully the optical flow does something wonderful to the footage. On a good enough source material (little motion blur, little noise and lots of sharp focus), optical flow can look pretty good. On problematic footage, you would avoid running optical flow, as the artifacts would be pretty obvious, and instead, you would prefer to motion blur your way out of it, or optical flow and spend hours in roto.

I was on a shoot last summer and I used my EX3 and there was a Canon 7D, and a Canon 5D. We all shot 29.97, so it would be possible to shoot 30P with the Canon camera. As to the 24P to dvd I am not sure about that. The standard is 30 frames for dvd and the pulldown is added in the encoding. Again why would you want six frames a second added by something other than what you shot, either by final cut or a dvd player. I shot almost all my footage at 30P and once in awhile interlaced if rolling shutter is an issue (not so much with my EX3). Phil is right, ProRes and test to see how it looks. Testing is always good.
Harry

Strypes, a commercial NTSC dvd is actually 60i. If the original is 24P or film, it is converted to 60 frames by use of pulldown. In other words frames are duplicated or added. Then it is interleaved. Since it was shot progressive the fields are separated for the interleave. Since nothing has changed on each field, it still looks progressive when viewed on a television. If it was shot 30P it is just interleaved. If you don’t add the pull down in the edit, it is added during the encode process. I still say I would rather shoot a project in 30P if it is going to dvd. BluRay on the other hand does do 24P and that is a different story. The reason a commercial dvd is 60i is for backwards compatibility for older players. The commercial market has to be usable on the widest ranges of players. It is possible to burn a progressive dvd but it will not work on all players.

Thanks, Josh.

24p on a DVD. Here is the stream info:

http://i298.photobucket.com/albums/mm273/strypes_01/mpeg2DVD-24p.png

For TVs, the DVD player adds a pulldown on the fly if required, after decoding the stream. 24p is preferable for heavily compressed end user formats because you have higher bitrate per frame. You cannot add a pulldown to a temporally compressed signal, unless you do a full decode and encode.

24p/23.98 is an abbreviation commonly used in the NTSC world. 23.976 is commonly referred to as 23.98 or 24p (Compressor refers to it as 23.98, and sometimes as 23.976 when you are specifying a frame rate). 59.94 Hz is often referred to as 60i or 29.97fps, and 30 fps is almost always 29.97 with the exception of the Canon DSLRs for a while, because the engineers got drunk and created a camera that shot to a frame rate no one worked in. 24p (full integer frame rate, not 23.976), is actually in use for film, but for video, everything is slowed down by 0.001% so the audio subcarier does not interfere with the chroma signal in an analog color TV signal.

2:3 pulldown, aka standard pulldown repeats fields, not frames. It has been in use for a long time in broadcast TV, whenever we wanted to go from film for broadcast. Adding and removing consistent pulldown is trivial (removing pulldown is also referred to as “reverse telecine” and “deinterlacing”). It is not a progressive signal, as you have 2 interlaced frames every 5 frames. I personally do not like the look of pulldown when viewed on an LCD, as I find it jittery but most North Americans do not have issues with it.