[MacDV] Re: Which format?

[Carter Tomassi]

Steve, you mentioned Sorenson 3. Is that the paid version you are 
talking about? From my own experience, Sorenson works best using this 
paid version. But even Sorenson Squeeze shows field interlacing (the 
horizontal comb artifact) on fast pans. You might try a very slight 0.5 
pixel vertical motion blur if you have a way to do blurs.

It would be wise to deal with the field artifacts before compressing 
the movie. There are a number of methods, none have been totally 
successful for me. I have tried the Magic Bullet demo, the DV Film 
Maker demo, blending Upper Field First into a Lower FF layer with 
overlay and blurs, vertical motion blur, etc. I don't recall how a 
computer monitor deals with fields but that may be part of the problem. 
If anyone knows better, I would like to hear your advice, too.

Last year I compressed a trailer for a friend using Squeeze. He gave me 
the trailer from FCP as at 720x540 with a data rate of 1.1 MB/sec. The 
largest movie we ended up using was 480x360 with a data rate of 140.6 
Kb/sec, that is the CD default in Squeeze. The interlacing as well as 
some other DV artifacts are still visible throughout the trailer. This 
was originally 35mm film telecined to DVcam. We would probably do it 
differently now. Here's the site: 
http://www.thevisagemovie.com/trailer.html . The other formats were 
done elsewhere but are still informative for comparisons. Incidentally, 
the Real Player version caused Safari to crash as it was downloading.

Have you also tried Motion JPEG A or B at 95% quality or better? Many 
After Effects people prefer this free compression scheme for doing 
previews.

Carter Tomassi

> From: Steve Robertson <stever at mindspring.com>
> Ever since I subscribed to this list, I've been hoping we would get
> into a detailed discussion about how to keep the resolution as high as
> possible - and the picture as sharp as possible - throughout the
> process of shooting video and creating a finished product. Several
> folks have recommended Sorenson 3, but I have had disappointing
> results.