Under the Gun getting HD to a DVD

Okay, here I am again....we are really under the gun, and I've got a dragon breathing down my neck. We've got six projects that need to be burned to DVD, and the rendering and compression time are killing us.

Project 1, compressing a project that was created and edited in HD. I've rendered it out to 1920x1080i, and I loaded it into Compressor to generate the DVD files (.ac3 and .m2v).

First off, the audio compressed very quickly; however, the video, at 26:13 minutes, has taken over two hours to compress, and has about 12% to go. That was after an FCP output rendering time of 20 minutes.

Is there a faster way?

Second, is this compression, using Compressor's settings for a 120-minute DVD, and using a 1080i 16:9 source, going to produce a DVD that will be (1) Letterbox, (2) Clipped, or (3) Distorted when played, or are there settings in DVDPro that can control that?

Project 2, importing video from a Sony HD camera as DV/DVCPRO 720x480 Animorphic produces video that CANNOT be viewed in real-time by FCP 6. I've had to take each segment into Compressor to convert into "Apple Intermediate Codec" to be able to play these items in real-time on the FCP timeline.

Have I done something wrong? The camera is a Sony HVR-V1U/ViN, capable of offloading as HDV 1920x1080i or DVCPRO 720x480.

In any case, writing out to Quicktime crawls, and encoding to Flash .FLV is even worse: at 1:03:23, Flash video Encoder's taken an hour to render a little over 25%.

Where can we save time here? We have more projects like these two and wolves at the door--and we're on a learning curve for FCP 6 and the HD camera to boot.

-- the SASS Man

As a supplemental note, we have Toast 7 Titanium. When I dropped the files from Project 1 into Toast, and set a menu for it, the program was able to start burning the DVD almost immediately, without another compression step.

One question, tho...could we just use Toast by itself, without using Compression first, is the viewing quality compromised? Could we save time over taking the trip through Compressor?

Also, are there any thoughts on Toast 7 Titanium versus DVD Studio Pro 4? Would we get better quality from DVD-SP?

Any help to get us moving along faster will help.

Thanks....

-- the SASS Man

In regards to Project1. Toast is not a Professional tool for creating DVDs. DVDSTPRO isn't either :-) but is kind of designed to be better...

In either case m2v files take time to encode, so yes it can take a while. I wouldn't use the default Compressor setting for a 2 hr DVD since you have a 27 min short. You can bump up the average data rate in Compressor and it should probably help you encoding time as well as the 2 hr setting is probably compressing your video much more...

Re: Project2 - It doesn't seem right that on a regular 720x480 DV footage can't be viewed in real time if you can do so with HD footage.. something is wrong in the settings there for your sequence perhaps?

We've been trying to get a clear answer on that one for a while. It doesn't make sense to me that the DVCPRO won't play. It will pan-and-scrub, and it snaps to the correct frame when it stops, so I don't think it's missing a codec, either.

Thanks for the info on Project 1, I'll give that a try when I put together the next one in that series. Project 3 has three vids for a total of approx. 25 mins. Project 4 has one vid @ 5-6 mins, Project 5 has one @ 10 mins.

Project 6 is going to be the killer, because it has no less than six HD tapes!

If I have to crunch all six hours of HD to get them into AIC, I won't be getting any sleep for a WHILE....

-- the SASS Man

Not sure what your quality requirements are, but you are going to standard def DVD, right?

The fastest way I know, if you are cutting in HDV is to drop the HDV export file ( yes...conforming time...) directly into iDVD which will compress your HDV file directly. I've only done shorter tests with it ( which you would want to do b4 committing to it), but it may get you out of the woods

Luck

Paul

Any file HAS to be compressed before the DVD can be burned. Dropping an exported Quicktime into Toast, DVDSpro or iDVD directly doesn't avoid this. Those programs merely incorporate the compression into their "burn" process and it will still take a while. You also have less control over the compression settings as you do in a program like Compressor -- if you simply drop it in and hit Burn you may be using the program defaults which can compromise your quality.

Using Compressor simply makes the compression process transparent, rather than burying it in the disc burning process. You have more control of the settings and you can tweak them specifically for your job, then save the setting for later (and run batches) The good news is that once you have an mpeg and ac3, the time to burn a disc is fairly short.

The compression time for Project 1 sounds about right based on similar projects I've run on my Mac Pro 2.66. You should be using a lower compression with a short piece; I would use the 90-minute preset, a you can test whether the 1- or 2-pass setting looks better (1-pass is faster, with some quality loss). But remember, you're crunching full 1080 HD down to 480 SD, and that's a heavy task to throw at any machine.

If you want to streamline the process, you could cut out the step of exporting a full size QT and instead export directly into Compressor. This will lock up FCP during the compression though, so if you want to keep working that's no good. If you have a Mac Pro you should look into setting up a virtual cluster on your machine as this will help your compression time a bit.

And don't worry about the 16:9 setting. The latest Compressor version just leaves the aspect ratio alone and DVDSpro flags it as widescreen so that DVD players output it correctly. On widescreen TVs you'll see it full-screen and on 4:3 sets you'll see it letterbox.

HTH,
JK

_______________________________________
SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

Thank you...that helped. I was able to create the disc in Toast, and it works great on our DVD in the studio.

I'm now crunching projects 3 - 5. Hope to have those cracked out by dawn.

Thanks!

-- the SASS Man

If you got an octocore with at least 6gigs of ram i would try a ''Virtual cluster'' with apple Q Master. That will save you 15% of normal time in COMPRESSOR.

Even if you got a quad core you can do it. If your interested about that ''Cores virtual cluster'' i could explain more or post you a youtube link.

>If you got an octocore with at least 6gigs of ram i would try a ''Virtual cluster'' with
>apple Q Master. That will save you 15% of normal time in COMPRESSOR.

It's way more than 15% of normal time. I'd say it's 50% of the time. The rendering speed for SD rips faster than real time in dual pass...



www.strypesinpost.com

yah strypes but i heard it work faster and you get the much of it when you compress multi-stream or one movie with more than 1 codec at the same time.

I did some test with HD footage, with and without "virtual cluster'' and with a cluster the best result i got was 15% faster ( with an ocotocore 5 cores taken and 8gig of ddr)

>with an ocotocore 5 cores taken and 8gig of ddr

I always crank it up to all 8 cores. Not sure how much faster it would be to down size tho...



www.strypesinpost.com

Well to do that you need to have a lot of DDR. You should have 2 Gig of DDR by Cores when you do the Virtual Cluster, 1 gig minimum by cores, so as i got only 8 Gig im not sure about the 8 cores cluster, scared of choking the system.

Sadly, our G-5 is simply a Duel Core with 6 Gigs. But I stayed up to crunch 'em, and spent all last night finishing Project 6, and they're off to Seattle today. YEAH!!!

Thanks, everybody!

-- the SASS Man

>so as i got only 8 Gig im not sure about the 8 cores cluster, scared of choking the
>system.

Worry not. I've thrown it on a 4 gig machine on 8 cores and it whips all the same. As long as you're not running a LOT of stuff in the background, you'll be fine.



www.strypesinpost.com