Converting HiDef to NTSC. Compressor...fails?

Compressor 2.0.1
QT 7.2.0
OS-X 10.4.10

The show started out life as a series of HiDef stills--30 of them a second. They may have actually been created at 29.97, but I do have a show that matches the sound, so everyone's happy.

1920x1080 (1888 x 1062)

The show is 8 minutes long.

I got a PhotoJPEG QuickTime of the show with married sound. It's 3.15 GB.

I dumped the show into an NTSC 8-bit uncompressed timeline and render myself silly. It worked. I got a nice letterboxed show with matching sound. It wasn't until we pushed it off to DigiBeta and saw it on the big monitors that we noticed that it was rendered in 240 line video. Everything had stair-steps and ratty sharpness. So the conversion didn't try to distribute the original show quality between the two NTSC fields. It took the quick way out.

This is old news and an old post.

A suggestion was to downconvert it in Compressor® to see if it can more intelligently distribute the sharpness of the original work against the two NTSC fields.

It didn't work.

STATUS INFORMATION
Time Elapsed: 18 minutes
Percent Completed: 100
Status: Failed:


It's done that a couple of times.

How do I tell where Compressor® is trying to put its render files in case that's a clue?

Please note the colon after "Failed:" The error service is expecting to give me a message there, and it didn't. There is also a message block in the process screen and that doesn't have anything in it, either.

So it was just buffing out the last coat of paint on the export when somebody blew a whistle and the crew went home.

I don't have the first clue where to look next.

Koz

Do we now for sure that Compressor 2 will run with QT 7.2? After all, Compressor is just a GUI over Quicktime that allows better control of the codecs, etc.

<<<Compressor is just a GUI over Quicktime that allows better control of the codecs, etc.>>>

Or sometimes any control. Naked QuickTime will not export MPEG2.

But that's a grand idea. Forget the shells and run QuickTime by itself and see how that works. I didn't try that yet.

I do hope one of these variations works. I think they're getting tired of waiting for this show.

Koz

I've been running Compressor 2 with QuickTime 7.2 for over two weeks and I haven't had problems...other than Compressor 2 being much slower than Compressor, the latter of which I've been so used to on my own system for the last few years.

Sometimes Compressor gives you the "Failed" message only after the entire f*&^ing encoding is supposed to be done, and sometimes that happens because of something moronic like a file with the same name already existing in the target location. Have you checked that? (Why it can't tell you before going through the entire conversion process is something only the gods know.)


www.derekmok.com

I'm goin' with the QuickTime Naked idea this morning.

I'm also trying converting to a framerate of 59.94 instead of 29.97. This should tell QuickTime I'm expecting it to pay attention to each field, not fake it.

Koz

We're so not pleased.

--QuickTime Export--

Failed: Export process terminated unexpectedly (11)

Yes, this is the same file that mounted in FCP 5.0.4, downrezzed (badly), and exported to DigiBeta Videotape.

I bet we're all going to laugh about this when I figure it out.

Koz

...That and Error 11 doesn't appear to exist.

Koz