Upconverter DVD players and home video

[Westcott]

QUESTION

Using a very good 3CCD mini DV camcorder (SDTV format) ...

Can anyone tell me - If I edit that material in some good NLE program and burn it to a standard 4.7GB DVD and play it on an upconverting DVD player through an LCD HDTV -

1- Will it look better than a standard DVD?

2- Will it resemble anything close to HDTV (I know screen shape will still be 4x3)?

3- Has anyone on this forum actually done this and played back on an HDTV LCD panel 32 inches or bigger?

Thanks

[guns1inger]

1. It will look like DV converted to DVD. It wont compare to commercial movies because the source is lower (DV).

2. No. It will look like upconverted SD DV.

3. Not with DV, but with material shot with Beta SP cameras. Unfortunately it had ben over compressed during authoring, so the quality was reduced even further, but on a 40inch HD LCD it look worse than some DV footage I have seen.

The phrases "Silk purse" and "sow's Ear" come to mind.

[edDV]

Assuming picture quality is your goal, here are some issues.

From what you have mentioned, the primary quality is set by the camcorder and the techniques used in original acquisition. You are off to a good start using a "very good 3CCD mini DV camcorder". Add to that proper lighting, a good tripod and basic camera skills and you have the ability to closely match a typical cable TV production.

Your camera is probably "prosumer level". Their camera is probably in the $10,000 - $40,000 range but still SD.

Assuming you maintain DV format through NLE editing, the next quality hurdle is set during MPeg2 encoding to the DVD. For best quality you will encode interlaced bottom field first at near maximum bitrates (e.g. >8000Kbps CBR).

Now you have a very good quality SD DVD. Next issue is display. If it is only you playing this DVD to one particular display, you can do some experiments to optimize playback, but this would need to be repeated perhaps in a different way with each DVD player - display combination.

In your case, you need to invest in a quality LCD TV with a video oriented panel (good black level, video gamma, good contrast) vs. a computer panel (grayish blacks, linear gamma, poor contrast). First clue that you are in the ballpark is a resolution of 1366x768 (WXGA) or better but those come in many quality levels. Also important is the quality of the deinterlacer and scaler in the HDTV (or DVD player).

You will be playing an interlace DVD to the HDTV and the HDTV will deinterlace and scale 720x480 up to 1366x768 (16:9) or 1024x768 (4:3) with sidebars. In this case the DVD player can be generic (playing 480i) and the quality burden is on the HDTV.

If you use an upscaling DVD player, both the DVD player and TV need to be good quality but the results may still be worse than above.

Method one: upscale 480i to 1080i in the player, then use the TV to deinterlace and downscale 1920x1080 to 1366x768. Note that the picture gets scaled twice vs. the above.

Method two: deinterlace in the DVD player and upscale to 720p. Then the HDTV needs to scale 1280x720 to 1366x768. In this case the DVD player needs to be high quality and the signal still gets scaled twice.