Working with 4:2:2, going to DVD.

farss wrote on 5/15/2007, 5:42 AM
Done this several times before without a problem, results looked fantastic but now I'm not that happy with the results from a current project.

Ingested through SDI into BMD card. Looks glorious on the Vegas preview monitor. Cut it with 7.0e, made two copies, got levels legal, rendered as Sony YUV with 1.4 PAR (it's 16:9) and the results look perfect.

Took the AVI file into DVDA 4, this has to be a looping DVD that plays on load with no menu, only way to do this is to make the footage a menu background and that means letting DVDA do the encode. At 8MB/sec result should be perfect.

But on playing the DVD it doesn't look very flash at all. I'm getting what looks like chroma noise (marching ant things) on some of the vertical edges when the camera pans slowly. I'm also getting what I can only describe as rainbows on polished metal surfaces and parts of the frame that contain polished surfaces such as gold mirror frames, this happens even in static shots. This is on an expensive Sony DVD player going RGB to a 16:9 CRT TV. I've tried it on a cheapo DVD player and the results are pretty much the same. It should look fairly close to what we get from off air DVB but it doesn't come close.

What's frustrating is DV material I've encoded in the past looks better, DB footage I've encoded in the past looks way, way better, just like off air. There just seems to be something missing.

Only difference is this time the encoding is being done by DVDA 4, could that be such a bad thing?

Any advice much appreciated, this is my first job for a new client. Always the way, eh.

Bob.

Comments

Former user wrote on 5/15/2007, 5:58 AM
"Took the AVI file into DVDA 4, this has to be a looping DVD that plays on load with no menu, only way to do this is to make the footage a menu background and that means letting DVDA do the encode."

You don't need to make it a menu background.

If you want it to loop, just set the end action to play the file again. You can encode it to an MPEG in Vegas. Set is as the start video.

Dave T2
DJPadre wrote on 5/15/2007, 6:22 AM
what dave says is one way, another option is to use the DVDA wizaard and select the last one (straight DVD) it will open explorer and u jsut drop ur mpg's in

this way theres no messin about with fake menus etc

jsut make sure u set the end action to loop
farss wrote on 5/15/2007, 6:24 AM
Owe you one Dave, I was certain I could do what you've suggested but in a moment of panic I lost my way and went back to how we had to do this in DVDA 2.
Duh, set the destination to the media, not The Most Recent Menu!

Still not quite out the woods though. Just played it back on a LCD and all artifacts are gone, looks perfect. So the encoding is probably fine. Just the CRTs and standard video is having a problem with the content. I'm thinking if that's the case then fixing it will be no trivial task.

Thanks again.
Bob.
Former user wrote on 5/15/2007, 6:32 AM
Did you play the DVD back on the LCD or just the file?

Do you have a way to hook your DVD player to your LCD and see if the artifacts appear. Just a way to narrow down when the artifacts are being introduced.

Dave T2
farss wrote on 5/15/2007, 6:42 AM
Played the DVD back in a PC with LCD, will try tomorrow with a DVD player connected to a LCD. Might get an old dog to have a look at the footage with a vectorscope. The outside shots look fine, it's the interiors with lots of shiny surfaces that are causing most of the problems. The hot parts of the shiny surfaces are where things get ugly.

I've done no grading, the footage straight from the camera looks fine, but I'm no expert on the finer points of what's acceptable and what needs correction to avoid problems like this.

The good news is this DVD will mostly be played through video projectors so possibly the problems will never be noticed.

Bob.
Former user wrote on 5/15/2007, 6:47 AM
You could also try using the Broadcast Colors filter. If you are getting the artifacts in the HOT areas, then chances are you are over the broadcast 100 ire level.

Dave T2
farss wrote on 5/15/2007, 7:29 AM
Already fixed that, peak whites are at 100 IRE. Even if they weren't the DVD players just clip them anyway. It's not the hot white areas that are the problem anyway, they come through just fine, it's colors like bright gold that get rainbows accross them, wierd.

Bob.
Former user wrote on 5/15/2007, 7:32 AM
Gold is a strange color for TV. It is really more Yellow. You might try bringing the chroma down on the gold a little.

Dave T2
TLF wrote on 5/15/2007, 11:01 AM
There are many colours that are otside of the broadcast colours gamut. The gamut for PAL is different from the gamut for NTSC, which can be an issue when converting from one format to the other.

The orange glow produced by sodium street lamps (in the UK) is one such non-reproducable colour.

Worley
farss wrote on 5/15/2007, 7:31 PM
Just looked at it on a big LCD HDTV from a STB DVD player. Looked fantastic. Whatever the problems are I'm seeing on the CRTs aren't in the encoding. I think I'll just leave well enough alone.

Thanks again everyone.

Bob.
vicmilt wrote on 5/16/2007, 2:47 AM
Hey Bob - a last aside on this topic -

I feel that the days of "perfect video for all" are gone - if they were ever here in the first place.

What I mean to say is that witht the plethora of new vs old vs newer technologies all in place now, there simply is no longer any standard that we can trust. For example, I just did a commercial demo where I purposely used a "shrunken" screen (720x480)bordered heavily in black which then grows to a full widescreen 1440x1080 - depicting the advantage of the new tecnologies, etc.

It looks great on my computer. But when I played it back on my 50" Plasa, the screen itself "recorrected" the image, two or three times, popping it bigger and smaller to fill the screen. The same DVD disc played perfectly on an older CRT television. These issues are currently out of our control, and you have to accept that fact.

But what you CAN do is insist on a "real player" demo, using the projector they plan on utilizing at the trade show (or whatever) for this particular project. That way there will be no surprises.

The rest, right now, is too sadly left to conflicting technologies and fate. (Very tough for control freaks... errr.... "professionals", like us)

v
GlennChan wrote on 5/16/2007, 12:19 PM
Maybe these are cross color artifacts? You get them if you have a composite connection (i.e. a single RCA cable) instead of Svideo or component.

If you have a black and white image with lots of fine/sharp detail, you'll get all these weird rainbow colors / moire. But you know that the image is black and white, so you know you shouldn't be seeing color.
farss wrote on 5/16/2007, 2:21 PM
That's what they look like, except this is on a RGB component connection (via SCART) and a composite connection. Also this is PAL, I wonder if the PAL system itself can have problems that don't exist in NTSC. I don't mean just the different gamut, rather that phase alternate line thing.

Bob.