ProPresenter Foreground Video Playback Codec Smackdown: The Challenge

Here’s a project I want to tackle in the next few week. I’m going to take a look at the quality of different codecs vs. DVD playback. My goal is to find the solution that has the best quality and easiest to use for my operators.

Current Setup and Reasoning:
Currently we play DVDs back through a pro DVD player. I say it’s pro because it does not spin down, put up a screen saver and you can disable the on screen menu. I don’t like playing DVDs through ProPresenter because the disk will spin down and there is a lag between firing the cue and video playing because of the disk spinning down.

Over 3.5 years since we moved to DVD playback we’ve had only 1 error and that was me playing the wrong track. Before that we had a track record with Easy Worship giving us a problem about 30% of the time (mostly video that stuttered or paused).

I’ve tried playing a DV-NTSC video out of ProPresenter. While it played flawlessly, the image was less than desirable. There seemed to be some banding in gradients, a slight blur in motion and too much contrast. I’m guessing this has to do with the scaling of the video to have it match the output resolution of the second monitor. It’s easy and 90% of the people won’t notice the quality hit, but I do. And it may just be because I know what it’s supposed to look like. It’s really not bad looking, I just know it can look better.

I’ve also tried playing the same DV-NTSC video out the firewire port to a Sony media converter. The image quality was better than the previous method and comparable to the DVD quality. But the down side is all foreground media is output through the firewire port. I create our sermon slides in Photoshop and import then as a foreground element. I would have to create our slides at DV resolution (720×480) because at the current size they overload something and all you get is a pure white slide through the firewire port. Because of the extra switching I don’t feel like this gives us any advantage over our current setup.

Here’s the test setup:
Intel iMac, G5 PowerMac, MacBook Pro and Denon DN-V300 Pro DVD Player. All devices will be run into a Kramer VP-724xl switcher. This gives me 2 RGB inputs, 1 DVI input and 1 Component input for the DVD. I will also compare video output from the computer output vs. firewire output to a Sony firewire box that outputs S-Video. This way I can fire the same video from 4 sources and compare them at the same time by switching from one to the other. I do realize that there are some differences in the quality of the connection, but that’ll be part of the decision.

Codecs to be tested are: DV-NTSC, MPEG4, MPEG 2, Photo JPEG all at different quality settings.

Anyone have any suggestions for test videos? Any other codecs to test? I’d like to have some pictures to show you guys but I don’t know if a camera picture will do this justice. But I’ll try.