So once the lenses issue was dealt with, were left with a selection of AVCHD encoded MOV files.  AVCHD is a processing intensive format that does not playback or edit very well.  While Quicktime would play the files, it clipped the blacks and the whites at incorrect levels.  16 and 235 were being stretched to 0 and 255 on decode, lowering the dynamic range.  This was caused by Quicktime incorrectly interpreting one of the header fields on the file.  The solution to this was to use CoreAVC to decode the files when converting into a different, and ideally more edit friendly, compression format.  Shortly after this workaround was developed, Apple released a Quicktime update (7.6) that fixed this particular issue entirely.

Beyond the clipping issue, there are other tricks to maximize the dynamic range of the 5D.  The picture style is used to control the way that the camera converts the 14bit RAW still into an 8-bit JPEG.  The same picture profile settings are applied to the 8-bit recorded video.  This allows you to do things to get the maximum detail out of the available 8-bits of color depth.  The first few projects I worked on that used the 5D, we used a custom picture profile that I got from Stu Maschwitz’s ProLost blog, High Gamma 5.  We did a number of comparison tests, and while High Gamma 5 gave us a wider total dynamic range, for our feature film, we eventually decided to use Neutral, one of the default Canon presets.  Neutral gave us a file that was closer to the final look we were going for, and with only 8bits of color depth, burning in your look, at least to a degree, should result in better picture quality at the end of the day.

Every file the camera records is named MVI_####.mov, with an auto-incrementing number, and no real override options.  That makes things simple on tiny projects, with one camera since each file has a unique name.  On larger projects, and ones that use more that one camera, (We usually have 15) file management can be a bit more work, to keep things straight throughout the post production process.  Our solution was to rename each MOV file with a unique 8 digit identifier as the new filename, and store the key to the original card and filename in a database.  This allows each clip to have a consistent name throughout the process, to show up on EDLs as a tape name or clip name as desired, without truncating unique values after the 8th digit for certain formats.  By the time we are done ,we usually have a source MOV, an Avid MXF, and an online Cineform AVI, all with the same content and file name.

Next up was the framerate problem, at 30p.  The first few projects I did with 5D we posted at 29.97, so the issue was solved with a simple reinterpretation of the framerate, when converting from the source AVCHD into an editing codec, and tweaking the audio .1% to match.  Unfortunately 29.97 footage doesn’t intercut with film very well, and won’t print back for theatrical masters either, so sometimes a 24p workflow is required.  For 24p projects, the conversion solution is much more complicated, involving motion compensated frame blending.  After extensive testing we concluded that this was best done with the Revision Effects Twixtor plugin for AE, or using Optical Flow in FCS Compressor on OSX.  Having a PC centered workflow, I favor the AE based solution.  With render times at around an hour per minute of source footage, it is impractical to convert all of the source footage on large projects, which necessitates an offline edit.  Since we don’t have timecode and keycode, relinking for the online requires a bit more creativity.  We have found some interesting options that are unique to Premiere Pro CS4, related to the way it links EDLs to existing source footage that make this much simpler than our first tedious tests, which involved manually rebuilding projects at 24p back in Premiere Pro CS3.  The new CS4 version can convert the TC-In on an EDL to a framecounted In-point of an existing media file, with makes the onlining of 5D footage a relatively simple automatic process after a few find-replace edits (.mov to .avi in our case) to the EDL.  In the future, it looks like Canon is going to support 24p recording on all of their DSLR offerings, so all of these crazy 30p workarounds will soon be an obselete thing of the past.

Although it is much better in rough environments than most other electronics, Canon DSLRs do have their weaknesses.  I have operated a 5D in temperatures of 20 below zero, and in the desert at over 120 degrees fahrenheit.  While we had no issues in the cold, where solid state recording has a huge advantage over tape, there are some issues at higher temperatures.  The camera sensor itself is a large piece of silicon, that generates a lot of heat on its own, and when combined with a high external temperature, in the worst cases is shuts off the camera.  You probably have to be over 150 degrees to get to that point, leaving the camera in a black metal box in direct sunlight for an extended period of time, but we have seen it happen.  A much more frequent problem, that is harder to detect, is that as the sensor begins to overheat, there will be much more video noise in the recorded picture, especially in the darks.  This is probably due to a higher latent voltage on the chip as its electrical resistance changes with the temperature increase.  This has only been a problem for us when shooting with the same camera for many hours in a hot environment, and our solution is usually just to swap the camera bodies for one that has not been used in a while.  This obviously requires having multiple cameras on set, which isn’t always an option on lower budget projects.

The last issue, that we are still finding new ways to deal with, is rolling shutter.  Having a large format CMOS sensor, DSLRs are subject to rolling shutter, or inconsistencies between the top and bottom of the frame.  I have spent the last few months working on a project that put the 5D into some of the most intense situations.  As a fairly lightweight device, it is subject to more jitter and shake than a larger camera with more inertia, and with the camera moving, the rolling shutter results in the recorded picture being slightly geometrically skewed, depending on the direction of the motion.  We also shoot high speed objects, like helicopter rotor blades, which are known to cause strange artifacts in certain instances.  So far we have been lucky with that, and haven’t found any of those types of issues in our footage.

The type of rolling shutter artifact we are struggling with the most, is gunfire muzzle flashes, especially at night.  In the dark, the flash blows out the imager, but the flash does not last as long as even a single frame.  So with the rolling shutter, the top half of a frame will be totally blown out, with the bottom part looking normal, because the flash had subsided by the time that part of the chip was sampled, or vice versa.  Setting the shutter speed lower than the frame rate causes it to screw up more of the frame or frames, and setting it higher causes it to narrow the flash into a distinct horizontal band in the footage, neither of which is desirable.  One thing we have found that helps is setting the shutter on the 5D to 1/30th.  (We usually set it to 1/50 to get similar motion plur to film shot with a 180 degree shutter)  With the 30p framerate, the flash either affects an entire frame, or matching parts on two subsequent frames.  (Bottom part of one frame, and the reverse area on the top of the next one)  This gives us an entire over exposed frame if we stitch the two parts together.  This can be hand cut back into footage that has been brought from 30p to 24p by manually selecting frames.  It remains to be seen if this solution can be scaled practically to our entire movie.  The best way to avoid this issue is to avoid recording gunfire at close range in very dark environments.  The farther you are from the muzzle flash, and the more ambient light there is, the less it is going to flare out your camera, minimizing the degree of the resulting rolling shutter artifact.

So that should convey some of the challenges are in faced in using DSLRs for filmmaking, especially on large scale projects, but it is by no means an exhaustive list.  As the tools evolve to suit the cameras, and the cameras evolve to suit the tools, many of these issues will become much easier to solve and require fewer workarounds.  The AVCHD decoding issue was solved by a new release of Quicktime, the manual lense control was solved with a new firmware release from Canon.  The 30p conversion process is the next issue I see becoming a thing of the past, if Canon can get a 24p recording option onto the 5D.  I am looking forward to that day, but in the mean time I have 2TB of 30p footage, divided into 5,000 shots, to cut into a 24p film, so I have a lot of work ahead of me.

First off was the Nikon D90, that shot 720p24.   That is a good frame rate for film makers, but the quality of the MPEG4 files is not worth serious work, especially with a lot of motion in the frame.  Canon’s 5D MarkII was the next option to hit the market, with 1080p30.  Dealing with the framerate is the most challenging aspect of using this camera.  30p is a fairly unusual framerate, supposedly requested by the AP for reporters to get both pictures and video for the web.  Canon’s next 1080p release in the Rebel Ti offered an even more awkward and useless framerate of 20fps.  Canon finally got it right with the next release, in the new 7D, which has options for 29.97, 25, and 23.976 fps at 1080p.  It also has options for 50 and 59.94 fps at 720p, which makes it a much more versatile film making tool.  The new 1D MarkIV offers those options on a slightly larger sensor, and with less rolling shutter artifacting, a phenomenon I will go into more detail on later.  Nikon has released a number of other cameras, but with no new features beyond the D90’s 720p24.  Panasonic released the Lumix GH1 which offers 1080p24, but the 4/3 lense system is not as universal as the Canon and Nikon offerings.  Canon has pushed the technology the furthest, so most of my dialog will be in regards to their offerings and workflow options.

Regardless of which DSLR camera you chose, there are many challenges to be overcome in using them on a large production.  First off, as mentioned before, you don’t have real timecode or keycode to track your footage or sync audio with.  It is a tapeless format, so you have to have a separate data backup solution.  In the case of the 5D there is the framerate issue if you plan to intercut it with film.  There are also issues with monitoring and playback, since calibrated HDMI based monitoring solutions are hard to come by.  All video capable DSLRs have CMOS sensors and therefore exhibit rolling shutter issues during rapid movement.  This is caused by the top of the frame recording a slightly earlier moment in time than the bottom of the frame, with any rapid changes producing inconsistencies in the picture, changing from top to bottom.  I am most familiar with the specific issues of the Canon 5D workflow, since I am in the middle of production on a feature film that is being shot primarily on the 5D.  I will go into much more detail about how we solved those issues to leverage the enormous potential of that camera in my next article.

NVidia and Elemental Technologies report that the accelerator can provide up to a 10x increase in encoding speeds, but mileage may vary in real world use.  With my system, I usually found encoding rates to be 50% to 100% faster with real world work, depending on the output settings, which is still a significant improvement if you do a lot of exporting.  The relative increase in encoding performance that you will experience depends on the speed of your system.  Older systems will see a major improvement, while newer high end workstations are already quite fast, so the change will be less dramatic.  My 3Ghz 8-Core workstation can already encode my HD timelines to MPEG2 for DVD faster than realtime, but with the Elemental Accelerator, I was able to cut the time for a two minute export from 1:27 to 30 seconds.  On a two hour clip, that would be a thirty minutes instead of an hour and a half.  My 1080p H.264 encodes for BluRay output only saw a 50% increase in encoding speed.

Exports of more complicated timelines see less of an improvement because render speed is not accelerated by the GPU as much as encoding speed is.  If you coming from a single flat clip, the increase in export speed will be much more apparent.  I don’t use AVCHD footage, but when encoding from those types of source files, the GPU can accelerate the processing intensive AVCHD decode, as well as the MPEG2 or H.264 encode.  This should lead to more dramatic performance improvements, especially on laptops, where available CPUs are not as powerful as their desktop counterparts.  When I first reviewed the accelerator software earlier in the year, I anticipated that laptops would be even better served by a GPU based accelerator than desktops.  If you frequently make these types of exports from a laptop with a Quadro GPU, this plugin will be worth it.  In the desktop world it isn’t as simple, since the CPUs are not so weak by comparison to the GPU. If you make DVDs or BluRays for a living it will be a no brainer, but otherwise it all depends on how much of your day you spend waiting for exports to complete.

There are still a few other issues to be worked out.  The Adobe Media Encoder CS4 is designed to minimize the decrease in system performance during background rendering by pausing exports during timeline playback.  This may be necessary on lower end systems, but eight-core workstations should have power to spare, before we even factor in the GPU.  This prevents Adobe Premiere CS4 from really utilizing the CPU power being freed up by the GPU acceleration, because any time it is called upon, the render gets paused anyway.  Adding the option to disable that functionality would be beneficial to both Elemental Accelerator users, and anyone else with a high-end workstation, so that they could truly multi-task their system.  Until then, its probably best to work outside of Premiere Pro during your accelerated exports, to truly take advantage of your available system power.

With NVIDIA’s Digital Video Pipeline in the works, its easy to see where this could be going.  Once they have SDI video inputs available, we could see realtime capture directly to H.264 and MPEG2 files, among many other things.  With professional I/O, the available GPU power could be used to turn the video card into a full editing accelerator card.  With SLI Mosaic and other new developments with the QuadroPlex, I can see it being scaled up to 4K frame sizes with realtime performance, and I am definitely looking forward to that.

It has been a long time since I have posted, but more is coming soon.  I spent the last few months working at a summer camp, but I am now getting back in the swing of things.  NVidia sent me some more cool new things to try out, so I will be posting about that soon.  Also at some point I should probably start posting about my extensive experimentation with the Canon 5DMkII.

Convergent Design had both of their digital recording devices on display.  The Flash XDR has been available for a while, but I have been waiting for the smaller NanoFlash.  It can record full 1080p HD-SDI or HDMI onto CompactFlash cards in the same MPEG format as Sony’s new XDCam-HD422 gear.  It is absolutely tiny, at about half the size of a 3.5″ hard drive, and is solid state.  I can envision a number of uses for it in rigging small camera’s on vehicles and in other rough spots.  The most challenging spot is usually as a backpack recorder for a helmet cam.  If Iconix ever releases a smaller CCU for their Studio2K, the backpack may someday become a belt.  The HDMI input allows cheap camcorders to record at much higher quality than their internal storage allows.

One other thing that I didn’t notice until after the show was over, was that NVIDIA announced a new SDI I/O solution, which should become available later this year.  SDI output is nothing new for NVIDIA, and has been available as an option since back when the AGP based QuadroFX 4000 was the top of the line.  I had heard over two years ago that SDI input capability was in development, but the Quadro Digital Video Pipeline has been the first sign of it becoming a reality.  Based on the developments in GPU accelerated encoding with the Quadro CX, I predicted last year that this must be coming soon.  I am still curious to see the details on how this will be implemented at the software level, and more specifically, what types of realtime HD compression will be supported.  The fact that it supports multistream capture is somewhat unique, and will be very useful as stereoscopic video production becomes more common.

That pretty much sums up the main things that stood out to me at NAB.  I have deliberately steered clear of discussing a few products that I will be using a lot in the near future.  I plan to post much more detailed info on those products and the related workflows once I have experienced them first hand on large projects.

Sony has a number of new toys that span the budget gamut.  On the high end, the SRW 9000 is an HDCam-SR camcorder with capabilities similar to the F23, and an all in one shoulder-mount formfactor like the F900.  With option boards, this unit is capable of recording up to 60fps at full raster 1920×1080, with up to 10bit 4:4:4 RGB of color information.  The next step below SR is really XDCam-HD422 at this point, since regular HDCAM is basically obselete.  The new PDW-800 basically replaces all of the functionality of the F900 (30i/p, 25/44p, etc.) plus the advantages of full 1920×1080 recording in 4:2:2 instead of HDCam’s 1440×1080 at about 3:1:1.  The 50Mb files can also be edited in their native form in almost any NLE, and can be accessed in a non-linear fashion directly from the storage disk. (No rewinding, preroll, or realtime capture required)  The new camera even has a network jack right on the side for copying the recorded files to a network, and can dump the proxies to a USB flash drive if you want to go that route.  That won’t be necessary for any workflow I will use, since Premiere, FCP, and even Avid can access the full resolution files directly without import conversions, for truly native editing.  Finally a workflow that is actually designed to “work” and “flow.”  Sony also had a number of new LCD monitors on display, including a 4K one, two circular polarized 3D screens, and two new 30″ and 17″ additions to their BVM line of LCDs.  The 3D screens look great, and while I couldn’t confirm the inner workings, with a single input, it seems to use an interface technology that would be compatible with Cineform’s new Neo3D software that I have been demoing all week.

The only thing I was really impressed with at the Panasonic booth was that they created an Economy line of P2 cards, but I have yet to find the specifics on the new pricing levels.  With $900 being the minimum price, an economy option was definitely needed.  SxS cards at least have SDHC based replacement options, which is especially ironic since the P2 cards are rumored to physically contain 4 SDHC cards.  Panasonic also has a new 3D plasma screen, based on sequential alternating frames, which requires active 3D shutter glasses.  I have also heard they have a new 10bit 1080p projector for $2400 that I should go check out tomorrow.

NVIDIA has released OSX drivers for the QuadroFX 4800, so it seems that that will probably become the highend card of choice for those purchasing the new MacPro, which was recently revised with Nehalem based Xeon CPUs.  I have been pleased with the performance I get from my equivalent QuadroCX card, and I am looking forward to trying a QuadroFX 5800 on my SpeedGradeDI system sometime in the near future.

Blackmagic Design has a lot of new products available, many utilizing SDI over fibre optic cable.  It is a pretty straightforward idea, but since fibre is even more expensive than BNC cables, I personally will have little use for it in the near future.  Their new UltraScope product is very exciting, and if it works as well as advertised, fills a big hole in the market.  Most other HD-SDI scope products are in the five figure range, so a $700 solution will be a very welcome option.  They also have two new variations to their Videohub line, the Enterprise version with 144/288 I/O channels, and the more reasonable Studio version with 16/32 channels.  I have filled our old 12/24 channel original model Videohub at Bandito Brothers to capacity with about 8 edit stations and the supporting equipment.  But between having 33% more connections, and 3Gb SDI support to avoid wasting two channels at a time, the new version would probably support facilities twice as large.

Thats all for now, as I have to prepare for another big day, but I will be checking in with my friends at AJA, Matrox, Sony, and maybe even Avid over the course of the week here.

Other new features in Photoshop CS4 that require OpenGL acceleration will benefit work on even regular sized images.  Images viewed at magnification levels that are not even multiples (1/2, 1/4, etc.) are now displayed at much higher quality, as well as being much faster and more fluid, since the preview is being scaled in the graphics card.  You can smoothly zoom to any level instead of the previous default 100%, 50%, 33%, etc. and the image will look perfectly clear.  You can also rotate the previewing plane without permanently effecting the image quality or dimensions, and continue to interact with the image at that angle.  Although it initially seems trivial, after a bit of thought I can conjure up a variety of important but obscure uses for this capability, most of which relate more to art and design than video post-production.  There is also a new pixel grid that is available to clearly dilineating the boundaries between individual pixels at extremely close zoom levels (>600%)  I am honestly not sure why this requires GPU acceleration, but it is unavailable unless you have a supported OpenGL graphics card.  My only complaint about the new functionality and acceleration found in Photoshop CS4 is that Adobe saw fit to specifically skip its implementation in the 64bit version of Windows XP.  Since this is the highest performing version of Windows available, Adobe’s failure to directly support it will cause its users continued frusteration for some time to come.

The only possible relief on the horizon in that regard is that Windows 7 seems to have been fast-tracked by Microsoft due to the Vista issues.  Speaking of future developments, hopefully we will soon be able to display 10bit color from Photoshop onto a Dreamcolor LCD via DisplayPort.  I suspect that this may not be available until CS5, but I am sure it is coming, based on the increasing level of hardware support on products that are now coming to market, with the Quadro CX leading the way.

The CS4 applications that will see significant performance gains from hardware acceleration, are After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro.  The improvements in After Effects and Photoshop will also be evident with any other previous generation high end GPU, while the new hardware accelerated H264 encoding support for Premiere Pro is specifically tied to the new Quadro CX card.  NVidia has also recently announced the Quadro FX 4800, with basically identical hardware specifications to the Quadro CX, and which retails for about $200 cheaper.  The extra cost is buying you access to the CUDA based RapiHD H.264 encoder, that is available in no other form besides in conjunction with the Quadro CX card.  If you have no need for accelerated H.264 encoding, you could consider saving $200 with the FX 4800, but I envision the possibility of NVIDIA releasing more CX-only tools for creative professionals, since that card is targeted towards that specific market.  Not to be overlooked, NVIDIA has also released the Quadro FX 5800, with an incredible 4GB of memory, but that should only be needed by applications with the most intense processing requirements, and is a class above NVIDIA’s previous Quadro products.  The Quadro CX is compatible with the same HD-SDI output daughter card that the previous Quadro FX 4600 and 5600 cards used, for broadcast and post-production applications.  Hopefully we will see more software applications directly supporting that interface card in the near future.  The Quadro CX is based on the same core architecture as the new GTX 200 series of consumer cards, while the Quadro FX 4600 was based on the same technology as the GeForce 8800GTX, which is now two generations out of date.  It is to be expected, that there is an all around performance increase with the new cards in almost any application, but Adobe has been specifically adapting their software to leverage the power of these graphics processors.

Of the many applications in Adobe’s new CS4 Suite, After Effects is the one that most fully and effectively integrates the power of GPU acceleration to increase processing power and application responsiveness.  Many of these features are not new, but by nature of the way they are designed, grow more powerful as GPU performance increases.  OpenGL allows most of the 3D processing required for advance compositing to be offloaded to the GPU for dramatic increases in performance and responsiveness.  There are also many plug-ins and effects that specifically take advantage of GPU power.  Synthetic image generation like noise and fractals, as well as artificial 3D blurring are some of the best fits for effective GPU acceleration in AE.  Many of these improvements are only implemented for faster previews unless the user specifically selects OpenGL exporting, due to a possible loss in quality based on the lack of precision of OpenGL, but certain effects such as the new “Cartoon” vectorizing filter, that experiences dramatic (30x) rendering improvements with GPU processing, utilize GPU acceleration both for rapid previews and for accelerating the final export render.  In most of the synthetic object (Noise, fractals, shapes, blurs, etc.) previewing tests I did in AE, OpenGL acceleration with the Quadro CX provided a ten fold increase in performance over CPU based rendering.  This is the difference between an interactive experience, and a plan-next-move-while-rendering workflow.  While any graphics card with OpenGL support can accelerate processing in After Effects, as compositions and projects become larger and more complex, the benefits of the Quadro CX’s increased memory and processing power will come into play.  Complex projects will experience a greater increase in performance than simpler ones, when upgrading to a higher end GPU.

The next program in the CS4 suite to experience major performance improvements through GPU acceleration is Photoshop CS4.  Most of these improvements come from newly added implementation of OpenGL processing, and therefore, like After Effects, they are not specifically tied to the new Quadro CX.  But the power of the new Quadro CX makes the benefits of these improvements more dramatically obvious, especially on larger images.  These improvements in Photoshop are fairly extensive, and I will review them in detail in the next posting in this series.  As far as the Quadro CX is concerned, with its large 1.5GB cache of onboard memory, it is more than capable of handling the largest and most complex operations that almost anyone would attempt in Photoshop.

Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS4 also takes advantage of the GPU in a few less significant ways, for basic effects.  The one totally new aspect that the Quadro CX brings to the table is accelerated encoding, specifically encoding to H.264 with the new RapiHD encoder from Elemental Technologies.  This is the primary marketing piece specific to the CX card, and my third and final post in this series on the Quadro CX will be about CUDA and its implementation in this new encoder.

After all of the Adobe tests, I had two other programs that utilize the GPU that I wanted to try on this new high end card.  The first was Iridas SpeedgradeDI, which is specifically programmed to run on NVidia’s Quadro cards.  The base version running with DVI or 8bit DisplayPort attached monitors worked great, and nothing I could do with my limited knowledge of the program could even get it to drop a frame.  The real test for that application would involve connecting the optional SDI daughter card for true 10bit output.  Hopefully the 10bit color depth supported by the DisplayPort will eventually allow that level of monitoring without the high priced SDI daughter board.  The highest-end customers will still require an SDI output in order to use SDI interfaced external waveform and vectorscope tools, or live broadcast outputs.

Lastly, I ran my favorite program, Battlefield 2 to test out the card’s 3D rendering capabilities.  BF2 was released over three years ago, and therefore is not a cutting edge test, but it is my most recent high performance game.  With all of the settings maxed out, at maximum resolution on my 30″ LCD, I was able to get 99.9 FPS about 90% of the time, with the occasional dip into the low nineties for complex scenes.  Anyhow, the Quadro CX should be more than up to the task for those late night “stress relief” sessions with any modern 3D “application” if desired.

Once I had thoroughly tested the Quadro CX’s acceleration capabilities, I endeavored to verify the capabilities of it’s newly supported output interface.  I hooked my HP Dreamcolor LCD to the card via the new DisplayPort interface, hoping to get some taste of 10bit color output.  Unfortunately, currently none of the major applications I currently have installed are programmed to take advantage of this capability.  I do have a small utility from NVidia that displays 16bit TIFF files in 10bit color depth, and I can confirm that yes, there is a difference, and yes, the combination of the Quadro CX and the HP Dreamcolor does give you full hardware support for 10bit color display.  Hopefully in the future we will see updates and plug-ins that will unlock this feature in useful ways.  There is a 10bit capable SDI plug-in that NVidia released for After Effects 7 quite a while back, as a simple demonstration of their new SDI capability, and I am hoping to see an equivalent DisplayPort version for both After Effects and Photoshop, especially since NVidia and Adobe seem to be working together more closely these days.

Anyhow, if you are in the market for a new high end GPU, the Quadro CX has all of the processing power that most people could possibly need.  At its currently available price of about $1800, it has directly replaced the Quadro FX 4600, and no question is a superior product.  Now if you already have a 4600, the jump to the CX is not immediately necessary unless you are currently pushing your system to the limits, or you encode a lot of footage to H264.  The Photoshop and After Effects GPU support in CS4 will work nearly as well with a 4600, but there is a difference.  With any other previous generation card, you should see a significant all around performance increase with any application that leverages GPU processing power.

That information should give you a good general idea of what the new Quadro CX card is capable of, and I will be detailing the improvements in Photoshop CS4 and the RapiHD encoder in my upcoming posts.

The second possible complication is brought to you by the fact that lots of HD footage is now being shot and edited at 24 progressive frames per second.   One solution is to make 24 frame progressive DVDs, which can work if you do everything perfectly.  I have yet to see this done properly, but Encore is adding more 24p support with every version.  I believe you can import and burn 24fps MPEG2 files to regular SD-DVDs in Encore, even though there are no presets for it.  I have yet to see a fool-proof flawless system for doing this, so I still add the pulldown myself for maximum compatibility and stability.  To do this, you once again need to use AE to convert a master HD export of your finished piece.  Import it into AE and leave it progressive with no interlacing interpretation, but reinterpret to 23.976fps if it is true 24p.  Insert the footage into a DV widescreen 23.976 comp and scale it, as described above.  Add to render que and use the same encoder settings as above.  In the render settings dialog, you still want to set the Field Renderer to Lower-Field-First, but you also want to add pulldown, in the dropdown menu directly below.  You will want to set that to the last option which is “WWSSW”, although honestly any of those would work fine for DVD.  You should see the output framerate change to 29.97 when you select a pulldown option, and you should be all set to render.  Hopefully this points people in the right direction in regards to getting the highest possible image quality to DVD from your high definition video projects.

Everything listed above is geared toward NTSC based production.  The first set of steps will also work for PAL, going from 1080i50 to 576i50, but your output render should be Upper-Field-First.  There is no pulldown option to go from 24p to PAL.  It can be done instead by increasing the footage framerate, but this causes the audio to need to be sped up by 4.2%.  Usually the speed change is not perceivable, but the final product will be a shorter duration than the original.  It also is not possible to generate any true PAL interlacing information from 24p footage with this method.