It took two days of pulling my hair out but I finally discovered why some of my interlaced PAL HD to SD footage looked crap while others looked fine.
As Sherlock would say “It’s in the detail my dear Watson” and detail it turned out to be…I like many of you strive for the best quality at all times so given the choice between 422 HQ or 422 which would you choose…422 HQ.
That’s fine till you Compress the footage to SD then you get a serious artefact called banding where your moving pictures have a stripey horrible look to them as can be seen below…
This striping or banding has been the bain of many an HD to SD conversion till now…the problem lies with the Pro Res 422 HQ codec…it’s too high in quality therefore does not scale well when compressing down to SD.
The answer is to stick with Pro Res 422 which does not have the same scaling problems as it’s higher quality sister 422 HQ.
