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Test Drive: Affordable HD Formats, Part 2

Sep 22, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

Obviously, I couldn’t use any of the cameras as source, since that might bias the tests. In a perfect world, I would just grab my Red Digital Cinema camera and go shoot some hard-to-compress footage in 4K mode, then encode that footage into DVCPRO HD, AVCHD, and HDV. Unfortunately, as our shrinking 401(k) balances keep reminding us, the world isn’t perfect and my Red camera hasn’t shown up yet.

So I did the next best thing, and surfed over to www.redrelay.net and downloaded some footage shot by the Red One camera. This footage is stored in formats ranging from H.264 to R3D, which is the raw Red format. Given that my deadline was way back in the rear view mirror, I was a bit loath to attempt to unlock the secret of the uncompressed R3D format, which would give me the cleanest starting point. Still, I dived in, and I was rewarded by a surprisingly painless workflow.

That is, I downloaded a beta version of Red’s own RedCine software. It converted the R3D file into a QuickTime file with several format options, including the Cineform codec, which is available as a free 15-day download—more than enough for my needs. I exported at 4K resolution, which input quite nicely into Premiere Pro so I could edit and output as desired. Problem 1, obtaining my test footage, was solved.

Now I faced problem 2, which was encoding the files in as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as possible. Specifically, I had multiple encoding tools at my disposal—lincluding Rhozet Carbon Coder, Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, and MainConcept’s reference encoder. All could produce the required formats, but there was always some niggling detail that made me uncomfortable—initially relating to DVCPRO HD.

Specifically, all of the encoders treated DVCPRO HD like the black box that it is—with very few, if any, configurable items. The MainConcept encoder could only produce at 1920x1080 resolution, which wouldn’t work because in practice DVCPRO HD is typically used at 1280x1080. And Premiere Pro and Carbon Coder could only produce interlaced output, which really stank because the Red footage was all progressive. Obviously, I couldn’t produce DVCPRO HD in interlaced mode and other formats in progressive, so I ran the first experiments in interlaced mode.

Obviously, interlacing wasn’t an issue with the resolution chart because there was no motion, so two fields merged together into a perfect frame. With high-motion video, however—which I was seeking for my compression test clips—interlacing would produce noticeable aliasing in the video, which would be distracting and might obscure other artifacts.

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