HD For Indies

Can you elaborate on 11.5? Why?
 

16:9 uses anomorphically stretched pixels to fit a wider rectangle into a squarer chip. This allows the qualitative equivalent of 853x480 on a 720x480 chip.

A letterbox, on the otherhand is a cropped image that uses less of the chip. Only 720x405 pixels...
 

What's about 2.35:1 ?

Shall I 16:9 and Letterbox as I do? I'm using a Sony FX-1? Is there a way to be 2,35:1 and use the whole amount of pixels?
 

for all but the most exotic/high end cameras, 2.35:1 is cropped from a 16:9 - effectively letterboxed, unless you're using specific 2.35:1 lenses (unlikely).

But shooting 4:3 to letterbox to 16:9 in SD/DV is bad, Bad, BAD idea. The ONLY benefit is it allows you to vertically reposition...if you were shooting film this'd be OK, but shooting DV you've only got 405 pixels not 480 to work with. Bad idea since so under-resolved in the first place.

To answer your Z1U question - no. Not without a special lens adaptor that I don't even know if it exists for that.
 

It seems to me that the "bad, bad, bad" declaration would bear a bit of clarification. Given that your blog is all HD all the time, I assume your three commandments to the humble yet ubiquitous SD shooters out there pertain specifically to either uprezzing SD to HD, or spending the truckload of money required to go out to film—both cases where every little pixel will indeed count.

However; to be a devil's advocate, I might propose that for those who are shooting for the wide-screen "style" but who are deliberately mastering to SD, with no HD aspirations at all (excluding those folks who want to master anamorphic DVDs), or who are creating SD or smaller-then-SD resolution clips for online distribution, your stridency might seem puzzling. The SD mastering folks will have to letterbox anyway to get "the look," and the extra resolution won't mean that much to the online folks.

At the risk of going off-topic, I personally think that future-proofing one's intellectual property for distribution god-knows-where-or-when is reason enough to retire one's SD cameras at this point and shoot in HD, making the issue blissfully moot.
 

Alexis, I agree with your future-proofing sentiment. But your acknowledgment of anamorphic DVDs kind of trumps your point.

Anamorphic standard def DVDs are everything for everybody. They look like a letterbox on SDTVs and they look like a full screen on HDTVs. And a letterboxed web movie is just silly.

Can you name one disadvantage to shooting anamorphic when its simple as pie to make anamorphic into letterbox at a moments notice?
 

I've been producing short documentary stories, which we shoot all in HD 16x9 on a Sony Z1U. I capture them as 16x9 anamorphic DV, which looks pretty good for SD. We do want our shorts to have that 'film' feel, so doing good finishing work and a widescreen frame is important.

My main obstacle to producing true widescreen is that I have to mix in 4:3 archival footage quite often. I've tried up-rezzing, several plug-ins, and Compressor's frame controls to get decent results, but either I'm not doing it right or it's just asking too much of that old footage.

Another problem is the distribution side. We show them on DVDs and on an 800x600 projector
I cringe to drop these nice wide clips on the 4:3 timeline, but until Blue-Ray or HD-DVD becomes ubiquitous, I probably won't be finishing in HD anytime soon.

Anyone else had luck up-rezzing SD footage?
 

Anyone considering shooting 2.35:1 on a 16:9 format should check out the canon adaptor they make for 2/3" cameras. I know not strictly indi, but worth looking at if your considering an f900 or f750 shoot. heres a link:
http://www.canon-europe.com/TV-Products/News/anamorphic_converter_story.asp?ComponentID=320038&SourcePageID=33108
 

Okay, this is slightly off-topic, but it is bugging me:

Whenever people talk about 16:9 in SD they use the 720x405 spec. But HD specs use square pixels, no?
Therefore, is the 720x405 spec correct?

Shouldn't it be something closer to 720x364? Or am I missing something?
 

Related question to Rule 12 (24p/CineFrame). My camera is a Sony HVR-A1U (HDV), which doesn't have 24p but does have evil CineFrame (which I've never even tried). I edit in FCP. My presentation formats are local cable (SD), DVD, laptop to projector, and eventually HD/BD-DVD. For what I do, film presentation is extremely unlikely. but I would like that "Film look."

Am I better off using evil CineFrame, or shooting 30i and converting later using something like Nattress?
 

It is my understanding however that the implementation of progressive shooting in some of the prosumer cameras (V1U for example) does not look as good as when shooting with it in interlaced mode. Someone made an offhand comment elsewhere that better 24 frame final results would be achieved by shooting interlaced and then converting the 60i footage into 24P in post, instead of shooting progressively with the V1U. Because the processing of the footage into 24P would be done better by the software in post, than by the V1U's in-camera processing. Is that correct? Would you concur with that?
 

Jim - you MIGHT MAYBE be able to get a TINY bit sharper image, but your motion would be all screwy - so I do NOT recommend that approach.

If your camera has a true 24p mode like the V1U, use that.

-mike
 

Mike-The thing is, it's the motion that most concerns me, and it looks kind of screwy in 24P mode. Adam Wilt described it this way:

In progressive mode, it's more of a mixed bag. Dual-row readout isn't used, so each output scan line is the sum of 960 sharp samples and the interposed 960 soft samples... Vertically, this same alternation of sharp and soft samples leads to an image that looks like a 1080-line image at times, a 540-line image at other times, and something in-between the rest of the time, ESPECIALLY WHEN GENTLE VERTICAL MOTION is present. It's hard to describe, really. Test charts show a clean 800+ lines vertically ON STATIC PICTURES, but near-horizontal lines show more vertical aliasing than might be expected.
 

Anyone know how evil the Canon "frame modes" (24F, 30F) are compared to Cineframe?

I saw somewhere that frame mode has substantially reduced resolution compared to interlaced (e.g. 800 lines in 1080/60i, 540 lines in 1080/30F), but I haven't gotten the impression that frame mode is on the level of evil that Cineframe is.

Best,
-- Elliot
 

All these almost/not quite 24p modes suffer vertical resolution loss AFAIK.

True 24p - my understanding from a brief skim was that V1U's 24p was true 24p, but if Adam is saying that's the case with the V1U as opposed to the Z1U, then yeah...get a real 24p camera.