Posted by Steve Guidry on 08/29/05 14:16

Hmmm . . .

I went the other way with that issue . . .

Specifically, we noticed that our "talking head" was blending into the
background, so we just upped the backlight to compensate.

Looks better on DVD, still Ok on VHS.


--
Steve Guidry
Video Works, Inc.
Live events for TV and Video
www.videoworksinc.com
800.844.4404




"Bill Fright" <billfright@austin.rr.com> wrote in message
news:6wzJe.135255$X76.84392@tornado.texas.rr.com...
> I was catching up on my reading this morning and read an article in
> Video Systems 2/2005 entitled Craft and Psychology. The short story is
> how we should shoot differently if we know DVD will be the end product.
>
> It suggested using a 1/2 tiffen softFX or black diffusion filter to help
> transcoders like Compressor do their job a little cleaner. Their point
> was that compressing creates softness at the expense of contrast. I
> didn't get too much farther in the article then that because I was busy
> burning the magazine. I'm so tired of people developing excuses for poor
> compression algorithms.
>
> I'm still shooting on BetacamSP and I refuse to move to DVcam because of
> the lessor quality. Now here is this article telling me to degrade my
> image to start with to aid a compressor (which beats the crap out of the
> image anyway) to make things look better on a DVD.
>
> I've produced a ton of DVDs from my betacam field tapes and since I
> don't create feature length shows I can get away with relatively
> slighter compression scheme. The caveat to that is they still end up
> being Mpeg2 which to me looks awful in a engineering sense. On the other
> hand they really look pretty nice, quality wise, especially since
> besides air they used to end up on VHS.
>
> So my question to all you guys is this. Is anyone filtering while
> shooting specifically for DVD? Am I not getting something here? To be
> sure I'm never going to filter for DVD it the show is also being
> broadcast but I'm curious to what others think.
>
> The last thing is that 1/2 soft is pretty slight but still it's
degradation!
>
> bill
>

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