DV Looking Good

Butch Moore wrote on 10/3/2008, 9:34 AM

I just got a call from a friend who shoots DV video for his church. His question was simple: "How can I make my DV video look better on large screen LCD TV's". His recent showing of a youth trip video was an embarassment.

I shared with him a few of the techniques that we use, such as good lighting, limiting camera movement, bit rates, using a tripod, etc.

During our conversation, it struck me that there's probably a bazillion consumer level videographers that shoot, edit and playback on their home widescreen TV and are disappointed with the results.

I've directed Mike to this forum to search for answers. Would anyone like to share a few professional pointers to help Mike and others improve the overall "watchability" of their productions? Try to keep your advice as non-technical as possible and within the context of what the average consumer can do.

I think this would help out a lot of folks. Thanks!

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 10/3/2008, 9:48 AM

I can't tell from your post if he was disappointed in the quality of the image or the quality of the production. You seem to have given him production pointers and you started with the best ones. I would add to that, NEVER use the zoom while shooting. Stop shooting, re-frame the shot with the zoom, then start shooting again. Of course a slow zoom in or out as an establishing shot is fine or to pull the viewer's eye slowly to a particular remote subject, but in general, after "Use a Tripod", the next best thing a beginner can do is "Stop Zooming!".

The other advise I give my students is: Get the camera away from you eye! We don't wan to see 60 minutes of your eye view of the world. Get the camera down at chest level or waste level. Shoot at different angles. Stay on the shot long enough to let the viewer absorb it. You will get board of the shot much quicker while you are shooting and often wish you mad more footage later. You can always cut but you can't add. Linger on those shots just a little longer.

Having not seen the footage it's difficult to give more exact advice. You pretty much covered the basics.

If they were unhappy because their DV footage looked pixelated on a 50" HDTV then it's time to get an HD camera. There are plenty of low cost consumer HD cameras to choose from.

~jr

johnmeyer wrote on 10/3/2008, 9:57 AM

I'd have to see the footage to know what to suggest. There are absolutely no right ways to do video, DV or otherwise, but there sure are a lot of wrong ways. One of the most difficult things in giving advice in this forum or elsewhere is being able to understand what problem the person is actually experiencing.

I have been guilty on many occasions of giving the wrong advice, because I didn't understand what was really going on. So, I think he'll need to post something that shows what it was he didn't like.

Butch Moore wrote on 10/3/2008, 11:07 AM

Thanks guys.

He was primarily concerned with the "pixelated" look he experienced when his DVD played on their wide screen TV. I think they have a less than spectacular 50" screen in their social hall.

Recently, I intentionally purchased a much smaller LCD screen for our lobby so that our archived DVD's would look tolerable for a few years to come.

If I plant the seed for an upgrade, is there a resource (website, books, etc.) that would explain an affordable HD/HDV workflow that would be easy for him to understand? We've already discussed some of the HD options...I think it gave him a headache. I'll loan him my copy of Spots's "Full HD" as a starter. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a teacher and my time is limited.

(I know he's reading this and feels like the invisible man!)

Where can a newbie begin and succeed, without the time and expense of trial and error?

plasmavideo wrote on 10/3/2008, 11:37 AM

I can suggest several things right off the bat that might help if he continues to shoot in DV.

1. LCDs, especially the older ones, lok like pure crud trying to display standard def on their native hi def displays.

2. Never put 16 x 9 stretch mode on to "fill the screen". Instead choose some form of pan and scan, depending on the set to show it in native 4 x3. Stretch to fill really accentuates the pixelization.

3. Use component cables from the DVD player to the TV and use a DVD player capable of upconverting.

4. Encode the DVD mpeg files using a good quality encoder with a reasonably high bitrate. Make sure he's not accidently encoding in half rez 352x480 mode, or some other lo quality mode.

My DVDs played on my father in laws wide screen LCD look great doing the steps mentioned above.

As pointed out earlier, lighting and good camera work are keys to the rest of it.

Going HD is fine, but if the final product will be standard DVD, then DV is still fine for now.

Good luck! There is a wealth of info available from the braintrust on these forums. I've learned a lot here.

Tom

richard-courtney wrote on 10/3/2008, 12:44 PM

Our church replaced composite cables (even though they were high quality)
with VGA type (UXGA) cables and a scan converter (Kramer Electronics) and made
a huge difference.

I hope to upgrade to SDI cameras et al in the future.

craftech wrote on 10/3/2008, 4:00 PM

Let's start with the obvious. The camera.

What kind of consumer cam is it? Most of them do everything but gather light these days.

John

farss wrote on 10/3/2008, 4:58 PM

I've seen first hand exactly these kinds of problems and I don't have a very technical explaination for it.
Put simply, you start with video from cheap cameras and lenses that look as good as video from the best money can buy and you "do things to the video". The outcome is a staggering difference in how the video looks.
I have a couple of dubs of the BBC's Blue Planet series on Digital Betacam. Despite my best efforts I cannot seriously degrade the quality, it just hang in there. On the other hand footage from the PD170 turns to junk very quickly.
Simple real world example of this. I playout Blue Planet over composite into our horrid early Barvia. It looks excellent. I playout footage from the PD170 over the exact same connection into the exact same monitor and it looks like crud, pretty much unwatchable. You might say, it's the DV compression. WRONG. I can dub the DB tape to DV and play that out, again over the same composite connection and it still looks fine, not quite as good as the DB original but nothing like the crud the PD170 recorded, go figure!

I don't really know the WHY of this, I don't fully understand why people spend a fortune to shoot content on 35mm when it only gets played back on YouTube. And yet the difference is so obvious you can't question their logic. Start with the very best cameras and lenses, don't trust your eyes unless you've got golden eyes, do everything you can to avoid any noise. Avoid anyform of image enhancement that is employed to make poor images look better. Cheap cameras relying in this to fool you. The results down the track from what they've done can be aweful.

Bob.

riredale wrote on 10/4/2008, 6:02 PM

The reason why pros shoot 35mm for a lot of stuff destined for TV is because of the cumulative effect of the Modulation Transfer Function (MTF). The fact that the final delivery medium is SD does not mean that one should shoot in SD; instead, shoot and edit in the highest quality format available, and then convert to the delivery format only at the very end.

Based on the above, the next steps I'd take (after dealing with the obvious, such as cable choices and screen upscaling options) is to shoot in HDV, edit in HDV, and then deliver on DVD, which has far better chroma resolution than DV (reds, especially, are all smeary in the horizontal axis in DV).

EDIT:

You PAL guys have better DV than us NTSC guys, since your chroma sampling is different. You don't get the smeary reds mentioned above.