DVX100 footage—how do I make it look decent?

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Richard Swearinger

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DVX100 footage—how do I make it look decent?

PostFri Jul 22, 2016 6:47 pm

I have been asked to edit some footage shot on a Panasonic DVX100B—a well-respected DV tape camera of the early 2000s.
What suggestions can you offer on settings/plug-ins/voodoo I should use to bring out the potential of this footage? The finished video will be projected in a theater, so ideas for optimal outputting would be most welcomed as well.

(I understand that people used to rave about how good the footage looked from this camera but I just don't see it yet).
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: DVX100 footage—how do I make it look decent?

PostFri Jul 22, 2016 6:58 pm

I assume it's interlaced (or with pulldown).
For such a task there is nothing better than avisynth, but you need a knowledge how to use it.

What do you expect from it? It's SD, interlaced (or maybe not), so when blown to big screen it will look only as good as it can. You can do a bit of work- remove pulldown or well deinterlace, denoise, sharpen etc but all of this has limited effect anyway.
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Richard Swearinger

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Re: DVX100 footage—how do I make it look decent?

PostSat Jul 23, 2016 3:32 am

Thanks. Those are good ideas.
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Uli Plank

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Re: DVX100 footage—how do I make it look decent?

PostSat Jul 23, 2016 8:44 am

Normally some contrast enhancement will help too, just watch your scopes.
No, an iGPU is not enough, and you can't use HEVC 10 bit 4:2:2 in the free version.

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Kays Alatrakchi

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Re: DVX100 footage—how do I make it look decent?

PostSat Jul 23, 2016 4:36 pm

In some cases, the DVX-100 will do 24p, so you might not need to de-interlace it.

What I would do is blow it up to HD, tweak your levels/saturation etc. Sharpen up the footage, then use a channel splitter to identify the channel with the most noise and run some subtle noise reduction on it. A way to also give the impression of more detail and resolution is (believe it or not) to add some film grain.
>>Kays Alatrakchi
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Robert Arnold

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Re: DVX100 footage—how do I make it look decent?

PostTue Jul 26, 2016 7:00 am

If you are lucky, that DVX100 footage was shot in 24pA mode, meaning it was 24p at the sensor, encoded with 2:3:3:2 pulldown to get it onto DV tape without recompressing any frames. If you have access to Cinema Tools (part of Final Cut Studio, or at least it used to be), use it to remove the pulldown to get nice clean 24p SD which will up-res very nicely in Resolve.

On the other hand, if the footage was shot 60i, you'd just deinterlace it normally (losing some resolution) and then up-res. If you step through some of the clips frame by frame, you can tell which mode it was shot in. If no frames are repeated, then it's 60i. If there are repeated frames, it's either 24p or 24pA, and doing pulldown removal (with something like Cinema Tools) will yield a MUCH better image to start with.

Feel free to PM me if you have questions.
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Robert Arnold

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Re: DVX100 footage—how do I make it look decent?

PostTue Jul 26, 2016 6:57 pm

Kays Alatrakchi wrote:A way to also give the impression of more detail and resolution is (believe it or not) to add some film grain.


Yes, film grain helps immensely!
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: DVX100 footage—how do I make it look decent?

PostTue Jul 26, 2016 7:02 pm

Just use a good one- like a real scan, not digitally generated "noise".

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