What is the source of professional DVD assets?

[MNale]

When a Hollywood movie is encoded to MPEG-2 for DVD, what is the source? I find it hard to believe that it arrives as a telecined film-to-tape transfer due to the inherent problems of IVTC and 3:2 pulldown neccessary to create a progressive MPEG-2. Anyone know what is used?

[auenf]

usually film -> DVD, or an export from avid or the like.

Enf...

[cupid59]

I work in a authoring company, and we do many DVD with true movie, also DTS audio and so on. The last our big title was "Amelie". The path from film to DVD is Film->Betacam digital->Mpeg2 encoder, for video, and Tascam DA88 (or DA98, if we need 96Khz 24bit)-> editing system (we use Nuendo) for mixing and/or sync the reel-> Encoding Dolby or DTS (we use software encoding for audio). Only some project have different source. Avid is used in some company ONLY for build animated menus. When No compressed AVID is used for editing (music projects, concert...), the material is recorded on Betacam Digital, with a SDI digital connection.

Cupid

[Pauly]

I guess MNale is asking about NTSC DVDs (IVTC and 3:2 Pulldown).
It's an intresting question.
If the mpeg stream on a NTSC DVD is 23.97fps and the player does the convertion to 29.97fps, then is the 24fps film telecined to a special 24fps Digi Beta??

[MNale]

@cupid59
"The path from film to DVD is Film->Betacam digital->Mpeg2 encoder, for video"

So you receive your material telecined with a 3:2 pulldown on DigiBeta? If so, what SDI MPEG2 encoder do you use (that handles the IVTC)?

[Flood]

I suspect that the master on the betacam digital is not yet telecined, at least not in a good authoring environment. Doesn't make any sense, the only reason for telecining is VHS, seeing as dvd/mpeg-2 has such functionality in-built.

My question is: Is the 1% pulldown (from 24fps to 23.98fps) performed before film is transfered to betacam?

[Nogami]

The 23.98 framerate is what you get when you transfer the 24fps to the digibeta tape.

I work in a post house and we get the same thing - the labs process the negs then send it to another place to transfer the neg to digibeta. The digibeta source material is at 23.98fps if you're pulling into a 24 frame project (on our symphony for example).

Typically the film is transferred in 20min reels, so we have to pull everything into the Avid and line it up to remove the reel breaks and match the audio via 2-pops.

Like the other poster mentioned, multichannel audio comes into our system through our DA-98 and via AES into the symphony as an 8-channel 48khz audio track.

Once everything is properly aligned, can either export it uncompressed to the MPG encoder (bit of a pain due to Avid AVI export limitations), export it as a frame sequence (more reliable, less effort, but slower), or, for quick productions, just dump it to DV and pull it back into the encoder via firewire (remember, firewire is only 5:1 compression whereas even the best DVD is compressed at least 12:1, so it's no big deal).

To author to DVD, I typically take the telecined material (unless it's pure 24p out of the Avid) and pull it back to 24p on the PC as part of the authoring process (the last project I did, I used TMPGEnc - worked like a charm!). So long as the transfer is constant-cadence (and it always is when done properly), it's no problem.

Feed the multichannel audio into the AC3 encoder and Voila! commercial DVD!

N.

[cupid59]

For MNale...

We work almost all time in PAL DVD production. Occasionally, we receive NTSC material for NTSC production for USA and JAPAN market. Our encoder Harware is from OPTIBASE, and it can handle inverse 3:2 pulldown from a 3:2 telecine from 24 fps movie to 30 fps NTSC (there is a little change in speed from movie and DVD in order to match exact 29,97 fps). In Pal system, the movie is telecined with a little more speed (4%) to match 24 into 25 fps. For ALL our DVD we received a high resolution telecinemated Digibeta. Quality of a good telecine is very hight. About animated menus, we work on a silicon graphics workstation in no compressed format video (CCIR 601), and record the results from SGI to Digibeta. At the end, we encode into MPEG2 format by optibase hardware. No software mpeg2 encoder match the quality, speed and flexibility of a good Hardware encoder, but the price is a bit hight, around 22000 $.
hi

Cupid