Very poor quality on export to tape.

[Chris B]

OK - So I've imported some footage from my PAL HV30 using HDV Split - looks great. Increased the saturation and saved as a 1080i export - still looks great. Exporting it back to tape however makes the image very blocky and looses a lot of detail. This is particularly noticeable on any movement scenes. Has anyone else noticed this - or got a workaround?

Here are some crops from the tape (all exported from PE4 and all de-interlaced.)

Here's the original off of the tape:


Here's with increased saturation exported as 1080i 25 then re-imported back into PE.


Here's a re-captured image from an export to tape.

Nasty....

[Paul LS]

So it has been rendered twice, once on export after colour correction and then on export to tape. I'm surprised that two cycles of rendering would degrade it so. Did you have the MPEG2 export settings set to 25Mb/s with CBR? This would match the original footage... the default export presets are lower bit rate.

[Chris B]

So it has been rendered twice, once on export after colour correction and then on export to tape. I'm surprised that two cycles of rendering would degrade it so.

Fair point. So - I just exported directly from a project without touching the clip (no increased saturation not even trimming the clip). Same problem. The re-imported clip is just plain nasty.

Did you have the MPEG2 export settings set to 25Mb/s with CBR? This would match the original footage... the default export presets are lower bit rate.

I didn't think this was possible with the export to tape. (Obviously in the above example there's no intermediate export).

This might just be one of those "don't do that" things - But it caught me out.

[Chuck Engels]

Chris, Is the Default Scale To Frame Size turned on?

[Chris B]

I get the same result with and without the scale.