Rendering does not improve video

jducasse wrote on 12/19/2003, 7:35 AM

My customers (videographers) are under the impression that putting their video in DVD format will give them that smooth hollywood look. Am I wrong to tell them to go back to the basic and learn lighting, white balance, Iris control and all that stuff.
I though Rendering only allows you to generate a different format of you video for the purpose of media compatibility. Who told this people that DVD always looks good no matter how bad of a videographer you are/

Thanks for letting me vent.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/19/2003, 7:46 AM

You can't really improve the quality of video by editing or rendering it. Yes, there are some mistakes you can correct, such as white balance being off, or the scene is too dark. These corrections usually introduce their own problems as well. A very dark video that has the brightness brought up will look much noisier than if it had been left dark. In the end, it's all a bunch of tradeoffs between which options looks better and are least objectionable.

Putting the video on a DVD can't possibly look better than the original footage. It may look awfully close, but it simply can't be better. Converting video to a different format involves loss of information, especially if the new format is more compressed. It's just a simple mathematical fact.

You are very correct in that your customers will help their video quality much more by using proper lighting and camera controls.

Spot|DSE wrote on 12/19/2003, 8:01 AM

You'd have to find a diplomatic way of saying it, but you NEED to tell these guys that they have to learn lighting, sound, etc.
The only time rendering to MPEG will make a video look 'better' is if they've got harsh contrasts and nasty fine lines bleeding into a lined background, and the MPEG is rendered to a low bitrate, progressive scanned. Then, it will mush and slightly blur the information, which might look 'smoother' to the eye, even though it's not accurate.
Also, if they are expecting a Hollywood-quality encode, 3 things to tell them:
1. Hollywood lights and shoots pretty much as well as it can be done. (makes for a great encode too)
2. Hollywood has a lot more money to spend on post production which fixes anything that might not be perfect from the shoot. Everything becomes balanced. Originating with film, and playing at 24 fps on the disk sure doesn't hurt either, as cadence never shifts.
3. Hollywood uses hardware-based, frame by frame encoding tools that cost more than a mid sized house. Get them to buy you a mid-sized house value minerva or the like, and you'll give them the same quality encode.
AFTER they learn to shoot and edit like Hollywood.

Jay Gladwell wrote on 12/19/2003, 8:26 AM

Although it isn't diplomatic, as Spot says, the truth of the matter is (and always has been, regardless of the medium), junk in, junk out.

J--

BillyBoy wrote on 12/19/2003, 8:43 AM

While all of the above is true, in the technical sense, its also true you can improve the preceived quality by getting rid of amateurish mistakes committed during the shooting phase making the final product seem "better" especially in the areas of correcting white balance, color shift, color correction that kind of thing. Which is why I wrote a series of tutorials on how to do exactly that using Vegas.

Vegas has a rich set of tools that makes it comparatively easy to "fix" less than prestine videos. People may think you're some like of wizard or sorcerer turning garbage into something far better than the original.

pelladon wrote on 12/19/2003, 9:32 AM

Everyone makes good points, bottom line is quality is influenced by, everything (lighting, sound, lenses, camera equipment, post-production, cast and crew).

How much time/money do you want to spend?

I attended the "Producing Digital Hollywood" class held at DV Expo West and that was the jist of Eric Galler's seminar.

Oops, getting back on topic :), just read a letter in DV magazine, how Ben Waggoner responds that going from DV to MPEG-2 can cause problems with highly saturated elements in high motion. This is because DV is 4:1:1 and MPEG-2 has the 4:2:0 color space. The combined effect leaves you with 4:1:0, which can result in blocky artifacts. No easy fixes either.

kameronj wrote on 12/19/2003, 12:18 PM

If it were me.....and this is just me....I'd turn to the clients and simply say:

Laaa - laaaa - laaaaa - laaaaa!!! Joey Buttafuco over here!!!

jducasse wrote on 12/19/2003, 12:50 PM

Thanks for the free therapy guys and Happpy Holidays. My wish this year is that Sony can convince third party hardware vendors to make stuff that are 100% Vegas Compliant.
I saw an guy at B&H using Adobe Premiere with a MAtrox card and the Real time preview was fantabulos

farss wrote on 12/19/2003, 1:46 PM

All of the above is of course entirely true. Probably what your client has is (again!) some garbled input. IF they had something that was done right to start with and they distirbuted it on VHS THEN yes outputting to DVD would make it look better THAN it did on VHS.

I have no real technical explaination of the following but one thing I have noticed is this... If you start with something a bit substandard and put it through several less than optimal processes (say editing it on VHS) then it gets much worse very quickly. If its 100% to start with it'll fare much better through the same process.

As I said I have no real techinical explanation for this but I've seen it happen so many times, clients thinks their old home videos on worn out VHS should only need low bit rate mpeg encoding so they can squash as much as possible onto the one DVD yet that's exactly the sort of footage that needs the best quality encoding and preprocessing.