Lossless is very misleading because nothing is losless except an origional file. … Which shoots the term Lossless for any compressed files right out the window

Absolute nonsense.

Codecs like Lagarith are absolutely lossless… meaning that you can recover the original pixel-for-pixel, given that no colorspace conversion has been performed. And, even when a conversion (such as RGB -> YUY2) has been performed, there is no loss other than that caused by the colorspace conversion. And, as colorspace conversions are essentially unavoidable in the HD -> Premiere -> DVD world (no matter what process you use), they are not even really worth considering as "loss".

I assume you are talking about "visually lossless" codecs. Not the same thing at all.

Even .divx or .xvid or .mov/mp4 etc are not lossless, technically.

I would never dream of calling these "lossless formats" … except for certain .mov files, which can be uncompressed.

I am making the assumption that the HDV file has been created and the only thing we want to do is convert it to the highest quality DVD file possible.

That means that you are outputting HDV-compliant MPEG2 TS @ 25 Mbps from Premiere and bringing THAT in ConvertXToDVD ??? Now this is a seriously lossy format! Whether you want to use my workflow or ConvertXtoDVD or ProCoder or whatever… that is a terrible choice for an intermediary file if you have better options.

If all you are doing is capturing from your HDV camera and dropping it (unedited) to DVD, then using the original HDV files is a fine way to go… but don't think for a second that recompressing from Premiere / AME -> "HDV" MPEG2 is anything close to lossless.

but it IS NOT by any means a good conversion program because it was not created for this purpose.

You are preaching to the choir here.

Ahh, yes. I suppose a literal reading of the thread topic might suggest that. However, the operative word to me is "export"… which seems to imply exporting sequences from Premiere.

So basically, leaving the Premiere timeline as HD (without nesting to an SD timeline) (and mine happens to be 720p/24fps)  and sending that to AME using MRQ, 2 pass VBR gave me the same results as the one where I nested my HD timeline into an SD timeline first, scaled it, and then sent it to AME.

I guess that would make sence since in "nesting" there is actually no conversion happening there. The scaling is more a visual edit.

The recompression happens in AME from the original HD anyway, right?

I would like to add that ever since I went from my mac with FCP, which on that program I used to export directly to COMPRESSOR and by selecting the preset for standard DVD, I never had any complaints. The quality was always great.

Now I went to Adobe with PC for more options and better workflows and I have to say.....
♫♪baby come back ♪♪♪♪you can blame it all on me♫♫ lol...

naaa... but seriously I'm going to run a test now.

Since I can't get Dan's method to work for some strange reason,
I'm going to export a quicktime file from Premiere as HD,
Take it to my mac,
put it on DVD with COMPRESSOR and be happy. (I hope!)

Maybe that will have to be my new workflow!

My client is ansious to see his DVD and I really would hate to give him the one that I already burned.

Which is not that bad but I know it can be better.

and the topic continues.............

-Promter-

I think what Dan is doing is really great but why on earth is Premiere Pro not good at downconverting HD footage. It is an extreamly professional video editor with a hefty price tag, the least i would expect it to do is to give me an output which is the best acheivable. If better can be done freeware, then someones not doing their job properly. I haven't tested Dan's route as for me theres just not enough time avaliable to do it, most of my projects have a very small timeframe and once i've finished editing, i usually just render as fast as i can.

With you there, but Cs5 won't have this, you can bet your moneys on that. Whatsmore, maximum render quality is a joke. I have just rendered a 3 minute video, 32 bit colour with max quality and it took 1 hour 30. Im sure if i had a render farm, it wouldnt matter but I don't and my computers far from slow, overclocked E6400, 3gb memory. That said, AVCHD is the satan of rendering, if they compress video anymore we might start making tiny 'black holes' in our computers.

Jeff,

Next time you do your test; throw in some progressive source.

Unscientifically; Ive reached the same conclusions as you (dissapointed in Adobe's on board solution still).

But i recently shot a gig in HDV progressive and found the scaling down of progressive footage much better than interlaced footage.   Not sure if this is really very helpful to a lot of folk; but its an indicator that the scaling of interlaced footage is much more diffcult to do right.

Curt

But i recently shot a gig in HDV progressive and found the scaling down of progressive footage much better than interlaced footage.

Yes. Scaling of progressive footage is passable, but hardly breathtaking. "Maximum Render Quality" makes things intolerably slow but slightly sharper – at the expense of some ringing artifacts. The deinterlacing is still quite poor, even at 'maximum'.

As you and Jeff know, I have tried to bring these issues to Adobe's attention but they just don't seem to think it is important or, rather, they feel that the status quo is "good enough." Instead of trying a new approach to improving quality, the simply borrowed the already-inadequate scaling and deinterlacing from After Effects. A little sad, but hardly surprising.

I will, as always, do my best to end-run these issues for folks who continue to be dissatisfied with Premiere's "maximum" quality.

out of curiosity, are there any encoders that will work within Adobe Premiere Pro that do the scaling within the encoder itself rather than with the software. Personally, I've never used a third party encoder so I wouldn't know.

Stupid free webserver… wait a bit. It will work.eventually.

I am posting here because Dan Isaacs appears to frequent this posting. I am still using Premiere CS3 and would like to try out the debugmode frameserver along with hd2sd. I have seen many references to that workflow, but I have not been able to find the workflow document. Can someone point me to it?

Thanks

Anyone know if this all still applies after the CS6 release.  So far, I've been impressed with the new scaling.

I created graphics in both HD and SD, and then exported both in SD mp2.

Suprisingly, CS6 graphics scaled from HD to SD looked sharper than those created natively in SD!

...I'm curious how the new CS6 scaler results compare to Mr. Isaac's method.

Um, I don't know about CS6 ... but I find the scaling in CS5 to be not

as good as the scaling method in my workflow; at least for my taste.

More important, the deinterlacing quality is not nearly as good as that

in hd2sd(), so if you have a 1080i source, my workflow will generally

yield far superior results.

Furthermore, for noisy sources, hd2sd's noise reduction settings can

drastically improve the conversion quality and compressibility.

Again, I am only talking about CS5. I have not used cs6 so I have no idea.

Thanks Dan.  I agree with you about CS5 vs. hd2sd.  I'll post back here again once I've done a side by side camparison to CS6.  I was just hoping someone could save me the trouble.