Cineform Neoscene and Prem Pro CS3.2 questions/Quest

[Canon GL-2 Guy]

Hi Ed,

I wanted to acknowledge your ongoing efforts. Thank you. Soon, I will respond at length to your replies.

To confirm:

1) Yes, the downscaling is HDV 16:9 to SD 16:9.

2) So, we both have Neoscene! The whole purpose of my installing Neo is that it has the downscaling capabilty built in which Neoscene (to my knowledge) does not have.

3) Just got back from dropping off my latest program (at my local cable station) compressed to dvd spec MPEG-2 straight from the HDV 16:9 master project timelines within Premiere Pro.

Does it ever look bad, however I was way overdue for a new submision anyways, so it will have to do for now.

The downscaled picture was soft & lost a huge amount of clarity and sharpness! UGLY...

I need Cineform to work more than ever now as the quality was about 30% of the original .m2t files.

BTW, what do you edit with? Curious.

More to come ina day or so.

Have a nice holiday weekend.

[Canon GL-2 Guy]

"to decide between letterbox 16:9 in a 4:3 DVD or a pan/scan of 16:9 to 4:3."

The first sir!

[edDV]

"to decide between letterbox 16:9 in a 4:3 DVD or a pan/scan of 16:9 to 4:3."

The first sir!

Which did you use?

Just understand with letterbox you are down sizing 1440x1080 to approx 720x400 then they encode that to NTSC*.

Did it look better doing Cineform or the same in AME MPeg2?

If no difference did the DVD look better played directly?

Also did the past native SD DV GL2** look better than either? The issue is downsize quality.


* cable SD NTSC is at best 528x480 60i. Lettebox would use about 528x400 of that.

** The GL2 would have been 4:3 native.

[Canon GL-2 Guy]

Hi edDV,

I’m far from solving this problem. All workflows tried to date yielded poor results. Hopefully time & experimentation will tell in about a week or so.

The verdict is still out whether Cineform Neoscene or Neo improves the final output to 16:9 SD after the source (edited project/) is subjected exporting, downscaling and further compression. In order to make a determination, to explore some more alternatives, I need to purchase a PCI Xpress firewire card for my PC and also see what Vegas Pro offers for a solution. I don’t own Vegas, however I have limited access to the program away from home.

I’ll export the completed project from the master timeline to a brand new mini dv tape, then have Cineform capture it as CF native format. Last step is to use Neo to downsize to SD 16:9 and hope it doesn’t look butchered again.

A couple of more questions to revisit if I may.

In Adobe Media Encoder two of the video settings are called level and profile.

Goal is a straight MPEG -2 file/ not dvd spec.

Is there a resource online that will lay out what combinations/settings of these are best suited for each types of footage?

Levels:High/High1440/Main/Low

Profiles: High/Main/Simple/4:2:2

My CS3 guide has 577 pages and says nothing on the subject.

Do you perhaps use Vegas Pro personally? Maybe it does a better job converting/downscaling HDV 16:9 to SD 16:9 footage for dvd/MPEG-2 delivery than Premiere Pro.

That’s the update for now.