I'm curious if anyone has exported their footage from their FS700 to a Blu Ray disc? How sharp is it? I hear the camera is not broadcast quality. I've seen the Vortax Media "Mastering the Sony NEX-FS100" and the quality exported on the DVD is pretty horrendous and not sharp at all! Makes me concerned for when I export my footage.
Not sure if you've seen the quality on the Vortex DVD but the quality is horrid. I'm hoping this is not how it will look. Vimeo quality looks sharp, the quality on this DVD looks horrible. There's a high amount of grain, high amount of aliasing, etc. I am not impressed with the export on that specific DVD. Does anyone have any samples of the FS100 or FS700 in DVD or Blu Ray format?
Aha. Now, I can't speak for Doug's DVD - haven't seen it. However, cardinal sin #1 is to shoot 1080i for DVD. It causes so many tears before bedtime. Okay, leave aside the 1080i vs 1080p thing for the moment: I'm sure the 1080p master looked wonderful, and that the 720p was pretty good on Vimeo. However, if you shrink 1080 down to Standard Definition, you'll get 'fugly' aliasing - there's too much detail, it's got nowhere to go, and so it sits in your image and twinkles at you. So you have to blur the 1080 material before you squish it down. Furthermore, if you have shot 1080i, you need to deinterlace it first, then do a light blur (1.5 - 3 pixels) then scale it. Grown up encoding apps allow you to do this (in Compressor, there's Anti-aliasing controls if you check the gear icon; in Episode, there's an OLPF before downscale option, etc). The best standard definition origination format has been 720p50/60 for some time now. Better than originating in DVCAM anyway. Also, MPEG2 compression isn't particularly up to date - it hates any type of noise. The format looks for edges and enhances them, so if you have HD video that's got sharpening and a bit of 'grain' on it, then do a 'quick and dirty' down-scale which buggers up the noise and adds aliasing, the MPEG2 encoder has a field day enhancing edges and noise seeing them all as 'stuff to be enhanced' - leaving little extra bandwidth for compression. I battled with this when we switched from DVCAM to HDV, but got to the point where I got great DVD results through a strange mix of deinterlacing, scaling down to 720p, then encoding to SD DVD. However, haven't had a serious DVD project in years and can imagine how some of this 'lore' falls away and is forgotten. Back to Scott's point: will the FS700 look good on BluRay? It will look (if well shot and looking nice in your NLE) awesome. Will reiterate once more: the non-broadcast specification of the FS700 is not to do with its image quality, it's to do with the robustness of the codec and the way it samples colour, and how that colour gets beaten up in the broadcast chain of 11 generations, whereas the BluRay chain (assuming you're shooting, editing, authoring) is 3-5 generations. Okay, so there's more detail in some other cameras (F3, C300) less in others (FS100, AF101), but less can be more - especially in Narrative, where bright sharp colourful detailed pictures would be a distinct no-no. But FS700 is a mighty fine camera. So much so, that you've got to tone it down for SD.
