Best way to go from HD>SD?

[Dave Blackham]

I just did a small test. I made 2048x1152 graphic and put it in AE composition of the same size. Then I made 2 comps, one with PAL anamorphic and one with square pixel (1024x576) settings. I put my 2k graphic layer in both of them and animated scaling from 100% to 50%, just like HD->SD. I exported both comps in uncompressed 10bit and imported those files in FCP. I created 2 sequences in FCP, one PAL anamorphic where I dropped anamorphic render from AE and one square pixel where I put square pixel render from AE. Then I exported both sequences from FCP with PAL ANAMORPHIC settings as for the delivery. Square pixel footage holds much better when it was converted into anamorphic than anamorphic did. Take a look:

Try this in compressor I bet it will be very much better.

 

[Dave Blackham]

I see. Good news then I guess. The milliondollarquestion is of cource, what settings is best for graphics with hard sharp edges if I want to do PAL uncompressed 10 bit?
I understand that there is no golden value but whats the most common settings to try first?
I don't think I can use frame controls with uncompressed?
What's "spacial and temporal"?

PM me your email address Ill send you a preset from which to start.

Uncompressed will work fine. Just an odd ball think here. When down converting from Prores HD to prores SD Ive seen issues that appear to be some sort of aliasing on hard vertical edges on ie back to white on a pan. On changing the target codec to Uncomressed then the issue goes away. I don't think this is compressor but more an encoding issue

 

[Marin Balaic]

Try this in compressor I bet it will be very much better.

Actually, I did try something similar a while ago, but Compressor 3.5 seems to have some strange issues I haven't had time to deal with. Downresing from HD to SD is awful and other people confirmed it too so I turned to AE for this sort of converting. But I know Compressor should do this better, yes.

 

[Nick Shaw]

I just did a small test. I made 2048x1152 graphic and put it in AE composition of the same size. Then I made 2 comps, one with PAL anamorphic and one with square pixel (1024x576) settings. I put my 2k graphic layer in both of them and animated scaling from 100% to 50%, just like HD->SD. I exported both comps in uncompressed 10bit and imported those files in FCP. I created 2 sequences in FCP, one PAL anamorphic where I dropped anamorphic render from AE and one square pixel where I put square pixel render from AE. Then I exported both sequences from FCP with PAL ANAMORPHIC settings as for the delivery. Square pixel footage holds much better when it was converted into anamorphic than anamorphic did. Take a look:

The one on the left looks like it has been de-interlaced. This will happen if your PAL anamorphic clip is interpreted as fields in FCP and you put it in a timeline set to no fields. Is this the case? FCP will interpret standard video resolution QuickTimes as interlaced by default, but 1024x576, not being a video standard, it may interpret as progressive. That would account for the difference.

 

[Marin Balaic]

Nick, you were right! I totally forgot to check if FCP will interpret anamorphic as interlaced! Thank you! I did the test again and the best quality I could get was by scaling 2k graphic in AE's PAL anamorphic comp and exporting that to 10bit uncompressed PAL anamorphic and interpreting footage correctly in FCP, of course :banghead:
I tried scaling 2k graphic footage in Compressor 3.5 to PAL anamorphic but I couldn't get even close quality to what AE exported. I tried several settings but none worked as good. I don't know if that's part of the problem a lot of people were having with scaling in Compressor 3.5 or just me. I'm sticking to AE for now, gonna do more tests with Compressor 3.0.5