HD For Indies

Hi Mike,
What is the best way to get HDV to 4:4:4 for compositing. What about taking the HD component output to an array...
 

It's good to know i'm not the only one awake. Only I'm at work... gotta finish this project... ben from Chicago
 

I shot a TV show last year for about 3 months and went through about 6 of these cameras.

We were using the North American Versions. And there was another DP on the shoot.

The article is totally right on shooting avoiding under exposed images. IT's pretty bad at keep detail in the dark areas.

My memory is a little foggy at the moment, but I remember the other DP, and myself (a dp too) did a slew of tests. We didn't like the Cineframe mode at all, and only used the cine colour settings.

Another major issue was whenever we had the camera at 50i mode. The backfocus would be way off. Nothing stayed in focus from one from focal length to another. It didn't make sense to either of us.

So, we just stuck with 60i, with Cine Colour. Some shots came out very nice, and a lot didn't. Producers left the colour corrections to the editors. OH well.

That being said, the colour correction is pretty good from the trailer. The exterior shots look good.
 

Dear TM... about 4:4:4 compositing (assuming AE, Shake, etc)...
1. as long as you render to a lossless codec, you are working in 4:4:4.
2. you might want to run Magic Bullet or Nattress' G-Nicer or some kind of median or blur on the chroma of the footage as a preprocess stage. This will result in better compositing results downstream.
3. Consider your interlacing / de-interlacing options carefully.

If you have more questions, pay Mike to consult! If you go down the wrong path with compositing, you can waste tons of time. Mike will easily pay for himself in time and frustration he saves you.

Bruce
 

TM

Do you want to get it to 4:4:4 just for chroma keying or for any other effects? As Bruce said Nattress has a filter that will pre-process the footage and actually cleans up the alpha to give you more info in the color channels.

Having said that I use the Serious Ultra keyer which is quite amazing. I use it on DV and HDV without having to pre-process at all and get great results. I bet it'd be even better with Nattress filtering before hand.

I thought I heard somewhere that there was some combination of scaling the clip down and filtering that can convert HDV to 4:4:4 but not sure if that is true or not.
 

Wes - if you scale HDV down to SD resolution with a proper tool (After Effects, combustion, Shake, etc.) and write it out with 4:4:4 codec, you've increased the color resolution. What was 4:2:0 at 1440x1080 would not be shrunk to 720x480. If the chroma was low res at high res source, shrinking increases the chroma sampling per pixel at the small size. Chug the math and you'll see what I mean (I hope).