Submitted by davebeebe on Wed, 25/11/2009 - 06:13

Trying AVCHD for 1st time (Canon HF-200) for wildlife photography. Previously edited DV tape from Canon GL-2 and stills from Canon 50D with FCE on MacBookPro. Using Toast 10 to author DVDs. I really can't find any advice on how to optimize settings and workflow to end up with the best NTSC 720x486 anamorphic DVD and am hoping to learn from the experience of members of this blog.

Camcorder: Shooting MXP (24Mb/s) at 60i. Tried 30p but fast motion suffered. Is there a preference?

Flamingo/VoltaicHD: Convert vs. Convert Custom (Compressor Native or NTSC 720x486 16x9 or HD 1920x1080 16:9?), Advanced Deinterlace vs. Custom Deinterlace or neither? If shooting 60i, when should it be deinterlaced? For clips without fast motion, is there any advantage to using VoltaicHD to specify Compressor presets like HD720p, HD1080i, HD1080p when the target is SD anamorphic?

FCE: New project start at DV NTSC 48khz Anamorphic or keep timeline as AIC 1920x1080i60 and reduce at end? Interestingly, if timeline is NTSC, video clip fills frame horizontally at 44% but tolerates cropping up to 80% before falling apart.
Output as default Quicktime (test did not look as good) or QT Conversion? QT Conversion set to H.264, NTSC 720x468 16:9, High, Multi-pass, do not preserve aspect ratio, deinterlace source video. Processing time to output HD vs SD for 2min video increases only by 1/3 (16min vs 28 min) for same AIC source. These times make me want to run screaming back to DV Tape. That hour to import an SD tape doesn't seem so long anymore.

Toast custom SD encoding: max'd at 9Mb/s, 16x9 aspect ratio, widescreen menus. Using toast since iDVD will not compress for less than a 90 minute video. For short HD, I'm using MPEG-4 AVC at 26Mb/s with Best motion estimation.

Sorry for so many questions at one time but any advice would be appreciated. What are the known trade-offs and best recommendations? It is slow going trying to test such a large pool of variables. At least I am experimenting with $0.40 DVDs for now.

‹ Converting AVCHD 24p footage from a Canon HFS100 video not scaling ›

Workflows

Submitted by justin on Tue, 01/12/2009 - 14:47.

Wow - thats a lot of questions :)

Lets start with the basics. Your Canon HF-200 is the same as mine - a HF11. I record MXP at 25p (its PAL whereas yours is NTSC).

Your main question is the interlaced vs progressive issue. For high speed shots (sport, wildlife) then interlaced is theoretically the best. What I have found though is that through the edit process, I'm having to remove the interlacing to give me the progressive output. There is possibly something I'm missing in my workflow to preserve the interlacing.

If you do shoot interlaced, and you want progressive output, I would de-interlace as soon as possible (in the transcoding stage).

From a general workflow perspective, I tend to work in Full HD and just downgrade at the end.

Since you are targetting SD output, its tough to answer the HD workflow questions. My personal preference is to shoot progressive, take the lower 25p/24p frame rates and work in 1920x1080 25p AIC or ProRes. When complete, I export to the required target from Final Cut.

For pure HD workflows, we are half-way to a native AVCHD end to end editor. We've got the previewing and trimming happening and now need AVCHD output. Once we have that you will be able to edit without any transcoding, and play the AVCHD files on a HDTV or PS3. This workflow will allow you to get 60i footage edited and into playback on a HDTV with no loss at all.

I hope this helps

Justin