Downconverting HD to SD during export

Romeo02 wrote on 1/15/2012, 4:47 PM

I work for a church who is in the middle of the SD-HD transition. Basically, we have a lot of components that are HD compatible in our presentation system, but we are still limited to SD projections for the time being.

We make short feature videos to show as part of the services (3-5 minute testimonials) In a previous church I had a couple of Canon XL2s and Adobe Premier Pro Master suite to work with. This church, we literally have nothing. I have been editing videos at home with Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10.0

We are ready to buy a camera. I have narrowed it down to either the Sony AX2000, or NX5U or the Panasonic AC130 or AC160 (depending on how the $$$'s workout)

Each of these cameras downconvert to SD in the camera, the Sony's to MPEG2, the Panny's to AVI.

For the time being, all of my projects will be SD-HD at a future date.

Am I better off editing in HD and exporting to SD or downconvering in camera and editing that footage? Any concerns editing MPeg2 over AVI?

Comments

Romeo02 wrote on 1/15/2012, 4:50 PM

I should note that I WILL continue to edit with Movie Studio for awhile, when the funds come up I will upgrade to Pro.

john_dennis wrote on 1/15/2012, 4:58 PM

If you have enough processor capacity and storage, it would be better to allow the camera to capture HD and downsample to SD after edit. Doing so will give you a better record of what happened. If you don't plan to save any of the video for future projects, it would be simpler to edit in SD. Modern editors and systems can handle MPEG-2 without difficulty.

musicvid10 wrote on 1/15/2012, 5:00 PM

A quick check indicates that the Panasonic SD output is DV-AVI, so the reds will not be as good as the models that deliver SD MPEG-2.

If you are sure that your only use of the footage will be SD, it is far easier to shoot SD. If there's even a chance you will want HD later, you will find an abundance of discussion on downconverting on this forum.
;?)

amendegw wrote on 1/15/2012, 5:02 PM

Romeo,

Welcome to the forum. A couple of questions, before I (or others) offer an opinion.

1) What are your computer specs?
2) What is your delivery format? DVD? BluRay? Web?

...Jerry

fausseplanete wrote on 1/18/2012, 2:28 PM

I downconverted a real 1080i50 project to PAL SD Wide 576i50 in Sony Vegas (via Bicubic Resize) and then also using AviSynth+QTGMC+Spline36 as highlighted and explained by Nick Hope in earlier threads/posts . The latter presented quite a learning-curve and geek-software setup-time but effectively doubled the resolution of the result (at least that's my impression from repeated testing).

Incidentally, I learnt (the hard way) not to trust the Vegas Preview window for such comparisons - instead, render-out and view the result in a player whose configs/settings you have carefully studies, to ensure no implicit/default ignoring/blending etc. is happening (of paired fields).

Three out of four DVD players I played it on showed no difference - one of which was a software player that was implicitly blending fields, presumably halving the resolution in consequence, another might well be the result of a rubbish old CRT TV it was connected to. I'm not talking video maths/standards here, just "life in practice" - the quality range of things ordinary people currently play stuff on.

So only some people may notice the difference. Regardless, I feel that the quality improvement was worth it.