Hello,

   I'm having some problems transcoding XDCam HD footage from HD to SD on an Avid Media Composer 2.8.  Basically, the transcoded SD material looks somewhat jittery and all the edges look very aliased. 

   An on-the-fly downconvert of the HD footage to SD looks fine when the HD downconvert option is turned on in the video output tool.  I'm only having the problem with any HD downcoverted footage playing in a 30i SD sequence. 

   Perhaps this is just the way it is looks but I can't imagine that this quality would widely be considered as acceptable.  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks...

-Chris

 How is your procedure to get your SD footage, Do you simply put the HD footage on an SD project's timeline ?

If yes, you won't actually get what your DNxHD board delivers, I guess you have one, because you say "when the HD downconvert option is turned on in the video output tool". Now the only way to get back this downconverted SD footage is to record it to an external device an later re ingest it into an SD project. This device may be another NLE with analog or SDI input, or a professional VTR. The VTR solution is interesting in case of batch digitizing because of the TC presence) This implies to keep the media (cassete, Blue Ray) after digitizing.

I just wanted to add, that XDCam HD must be converted into a DNxHD format for optimal use on an Adrenaline. After importing XDCam footage into Adrenaline, even with DNx codec selected you still get a long GOP mpeg footage, and NO DNx ! transcode it, Mixdown also works to transcode .

Hi Sep, thanks for your quick response.  Here's my workflow:

I open an NTSC/30i project then File -> Import the XDCam HD footage from a local hard drive (the full resolution file, not the proxy).  I right click the footage in the bin and select consolidate/transcode.  I select the transcode option and select a destination drive and 2:1 MXF as the target resolution.  The subsequent file it creates, Whatever.new.01, has the aliasing and jitter problems I decribed above. 

Any idea if there's something I'm missing?  Thanks...

-Chris

 That's the software way to do it, which is not acceptable, I know, I never got any correct downconversion this way. I don't know what is your XDCam device, but you may output SD from it, it won't be a super broadcast quality, but probably better than a mixdown even to 1;1.Our PDW 330 XDCam camera allows to output SD via firewire, or/and component.