fine lines on tv

[Josh]

Fine lines .... hum ho. My issue I've decided is linked to the processing in the Panasonic plasma TV of how it graduates or not a grey scale. This grey scale around sunsets, sky lines can be rough in HD and since I now know what I'm looking for I can always find it if I'm looking out for it. It does it on both my HD TV boxes, I'll have a good look on the bluray when I get home after Xmas break, but I bet it's still there, which is as said graduation in grey scales.

On blu-ray and HD recording Tony, I'd already gone HD on sat about two years [one year with the terrible Pace 810], then changed to the CT5000 at the start of the year with the PVR function via external disk drive. I judged with plenty of access to HD films over the air and ability to record you don't really need blu-ray unless you are a collector of studio films and like the DVD / blu-ray extras. I'd trade the cost of that mostly for sat equipment.

Another dimension is HD video recording where recording your holiday pictures in SD is noticeable down grading from what you are use to. In Easter Island last year [I travel ] the head on my old Sony digital compact 8mm tape camera gunged up with the warning light coming on. The rest of the pics during the trip seemed to have a slight issue, this is after the tape cleaning ritual.

So before the next big trip the question was should I get the camera overhauled but still have SD or switch to HD. I opted to switch to a new camera which also record in 5.1 dolby . It's a Panasonic HDC-HS100 60GB HHD Full HD Camcorder (PAL).

>>The HS100 is a hybrid model that records full-HD images onto either an SD (or SDHC) Memory Card or the built-in 60-GB hard disk. A 32-GB SDHC Memory Card** can hold around 12 hours of recorded video clips, and the 60-GB hard disk can hold around 23 hours (both in HE mode). This gives the HS100 a total capacity of around 35 hours of full-HD recording. The HS100 can copy recorded video images from the SD Memory Card to the hard disk, or vice versa, with easy operation.

* Advanced O.I.S. (Optical Image Stabilization) detects hand-shake and then triggers the lens to shift to correctly align the optical axis, helping to ensure videos are sharp and reduce blur. This happens at a rate of 4,000 times per second.
* Face Detection automatically adjusts the exposure, contrast, skin complexion effect, and focus so that faces are always clear. Face Detection can detect up to 15 faces in a frame.
* Intelligent Contrast Control continually measures the ambient light intensity and adjusts the contrast as it changes, helping to prevent a washed-out look in bright parts of an image and black-outs in parts with shadows.
* Intelligent Scene Selection which determines the shooting environment and automatically selects the appropriate scene setting for optimal results.
<<

3 MOS, Leica lens, it didn't say that. The recording format is AVCHD which is a Sony / Panasonic standard for recording HD on consumer equipment for solid state and direct access drives ie. not tapes. That eclipsed the old consumer standard. AVCHD has been a standard for the last two years but twigged a bit. There is now a professional extension which is available on professional cameras, surprise. That ups the bit rate. XA is the top consumer standard of AVCHD which is full 1080p HD at full resolution.

So that then left how to display the pictures. Exploration of the CT5000 and output showed that you could output pictures via the sat box but the CT5000 had issues with AVCHD and not MPEG2 HD. At full HD the CT5000 couldn't handle MPEG2 HD, too much information for the processor. So you had to render down [loose resolution] if you wanted to use the sat box plus big processing on a PC to render and encode.

Back of my mind to skip all of this and just buy a blu-ray Panasonic with the build in SD and AVCHD software to cover both blu-ray and home videos via AVCHD on a DVD or SD card. Sony don't do SD BTW so don't buy Sony if you want to use SD cards. Mother's TV packed up and I replaced that by HD ready LCD which meant the net of TVs to show HD pics on went up by another one.

Bought the blu-ray [Panasonic BD35] and can now play the original material not re-rendered and without very long processing times, just slip in the SD card. You can copy the material from the cameras hard disk, to SD, to PC hard disk to DVD etc and so forth. Best to keep it on SD card since the DVD cuts down your running time. SD cards, 16 Gb from the channel islands cost £17 which isn't bad for about 2.5 hours of high quality HD [XA standard].

So this now leaves what to do with the HD material that you have recorded off air. Now on the Panasonic you can't use BD5 or BD9 which is the 4.7 / 9 GB standards, they don't support them, but they do support AVCHD. So here we go taking the transport layer stream and re-rendering that to AVCHD, that will be what I'll cover in the notes.

This output gave me a range of films that I'd recorded in the year to watch for my amusement over the Xmas break when not at home. It's perhaps less ideal that on DVD you can only get at max 60 mins in AVCHD full quality and for Transformers the last 30 mins had so much action in it, that it took my laptop 24 hours just to re-render it and recode. Happy to run this process on an annual basis but I can't see that I'll offload too much. You can reckon on two days of processing for a film !.

I will post up this process. Where would you like it ?.

[parad0x_i]

Interesting information as always Josh.. :regular_smile:

I will come back to digest all this when i have more time.. Meanwhile you can post where you think it is most suitable.. HD Tv or Blue-Ray whichever is closest..

:thumbs_up:

[Josh]

OK I've posted it in the CT Tutorial section although I reckon all HD boxes where you can get at the hard disk data stream will be the same, since they store the original data stream all the same. Hence it's a solution across boxes.

Still dross postings on other boards where they assume that the BD5 standard produced by TSREMUX plays on all bluray drives.

Thread here:

http://www.satmoz.com/forum/showthre...238#post176238

Feel free to pin it up. Done!.. Tnx