• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Events

 

Shooting for Streaming, Part 1

Aug 11, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

The high-level test setup was this. I created a simple scene in my office, just me and the DSC Labs ChromaDuMonde chart. Then I shot the scene with two different camcorders—one in 16:9 DV mode, the other in 1080i HDV mode. Both were in Canon’s Frame mode, which is the company's version of progressive, and all other camera settings were identical.

After the shoot, I created separate projects for each source video in Adobe Premiere Pro, one at DV resolution, one at HDV resolution. That way, I could capture and process each file at its full resolution, which I then did. Then, I exported an H.264 file from each Premiere Pro project at 640x360 resolution, 30fps, at a data rate of 600kbps—which should be more than sufficient for the talking-head video.

Then I compared the two files, which you can see in Figure 1, and I found that the video from the high-definition source had noticeably better still frame quality and fewer artifacts during playback. If you look at Figure 1, you’ll notice that the text in the HDV frame is noticeably sharper, that the picture frame to my right has much less aliasing, and even that my face seems to “pop” much more noticeably on the HDV source video.

In short, things were looking grim for our hero, and I starting thinking about recipes for the crow it looked like I was going to be eating. But something didn’t feel right about the results. So I duplicated the tests in Apple Final Cut Pro, and I found the resultant frames and video almost identical in quality, as you can see in Figure 2.

Gone was the aliasing around the picture frame and the noticeable disparity in the detail in the chart. Gone were the motion artifacts during realtime playback. Gone was HDV’s superior clarity around the face.

The obvious questions started to come, fast and furious. Was I doing something wrong in Premiere Pro, or could I somehow duplicate Compressor’s quality? What would happen if I encoded the files in a third-party program such as Sorenson Media Squeeze, and what settings would I use to create the intermediate file in Premiere Pro? Was shooting in HDV best practice or not? Most importantly, would I have to admit defeat when I next met with Mr. Siglin?

Tune in next time—same bat time, same bat channel.

© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.