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Hi all

I am using my PMW-350 for both High Def (HD) and Standard Def PAL (SD) work and when doing SD work I often have the SDI video out plugged into a Link XP Digilink for live stuff with a sat truck. The output for the SDI BNC is set to SD&DV or SD&HDV, the quality appears to be the same.

I do not have the DVCam board and run the camera entirely as if it was HD throughout but have the output video BNC set to SD-SDI mode for the Digilink. The pictures do not look great, in fact that is an understatement. I am not using the composite out BNC but the SDI out BNC. I can only assume the downconverter is not great in the 350 as the pics look much worse than a native SD camera. I have spoken to Topteks and they say that the DVCam board would not be relevant in this situation. To make the pictures look remotely sharp I have got the detail way up.

Any ideas from all you users out there? I need a setup for SD output from the SDI BNC.

Steve Ryder

The issue is that when you take an image optimised for HD and do a simple SD downconversion the pictures will not look good, and this will happen with most cameras. The detail settings etc are all wrong for SD. To get the best SD image you need to soften the HD pictures and increase the thickness of the detail correction edges. You have to consider that a 4 pixel HD detail correction becomes just 1 pixel wide when down converted and this will then alias and decrease the image quality. See this thread in my blog for some info on the problem, http://www.xdcam-user.com/2009/11/getti ... rsampling/

Turning the detail frequency way down, into the negative numbers should help the SD, but will degrade the HD.

Thank you for the reply and I am working on it. Unfortunately I do not have the option of post production on the sat truck.

I found my detail correction notes for a SD optimised scene file, looks good in SD but terrible in HD: The key setting is the Frequency which thickens up the correction edges.

Detail level +20, Detail Frequency -65, White limiter +35, Black limiter +45.

Doing the welsh referendum tomorrow, I will try it out. Many thanks.