Little Frog in High Def

Looks good, Shane! 2 questions:

1) Any HVX200 footage in the trailer, or the entire show?

2) In terms of the archival footage, you took 4×3 imagery from VHS, upconverted it to DVCPRO HD (16:9), and lost the tops and bottoms of the original 4×3 frame, yes?

-Helmut

1) No HVX footage in this show at all. We shot all our footage with the Varicam. Then we used stock footage from many sources, PAL VHS, DV, BetaSP. Which gets us to…

2) Mostly yes. But we also framed for the top (losing footage on the bottom) or did bottom framing (losing footage on the top). But yes, footage was upconverted (mainly using a Terranex box) and reframed.

Thanks!

And just curious: why did you guys use the Terranex to convert 4×3 to DVCPRO HD? Why not just capture the 4×3 footage uncompressed, and do the HD conversion using Compressor, or a Kona card, or some other Mac-based tool (as you did for a minority of shots)? Was the conversion process too slow for so many shots? Or was there better quality with the Terranex route?
-H

The biggest reason is that there was SO MUCH stock footage. Using Compressor to get high quality results takes a LONG time. And the Kona card we had was the LH, not the Kona 3, so we couldn’t upconvert that way.

We did capture the stock footage as 8-bit uncompressed, strung together what we used in the show, and output to beta for the upconvert porcess.

Plus, the Terranex has noise reduction that is superior to a Kona 3. The Terranex Mini is comparable to the Kona 3 when it comes to noise reduction.

But yes, we had too much footage to convert to do it all in house.