rendering a DVD mpeg movie

Hi,
I'm trying to render an Mpeg2 movie using Compressor in Final Cut Pro. On my timeline, I have 32 TIFF stills with a very big resolution: from 3893x2160 to 6765x2160 with a 300 DPI and they just fade from one to another. The total length of my timeline is 60 min. I need to put this on a DVD. I've rendered a movie using compressor at a bitrate of 6.5 mbps and the result is pretty poor. I thought I would get a great quality with images that big but instead I get a movie pretty pixellated. I tried to change all kinds of settings but I can't get a good quality mpeg movie.
Please somebody help, I need to solve this problem as soon as possible.
Thanks.

Romain Vaunois

Romain,

WOW! I'm surprised that it plays with images that big. I would suggest down-sizing those images, but try this... EXPORT Quicktime Movie / Self Contained, bring that back into FCP then EXPORT via COMPRESSOR.

Steve

No matter what size you started out with, when you bring the images into the timeline, they are scaled to the dimensions of the timeline. They could be 10000 wide and still only be 720 wide in your output.

Did you look at the movie on an NTSC monitor or a TV? If you use the computer monitor to display a 720 wide image, you are going to get a pixelated image. The monitor's resolution probably exceeds your video image by a wide margin. Before you panic, first make sure you're viewing the result on either an NTSC monitor or a TV.

bob rice
frameworx media

I would suggest downsizing and reinserting your stills. This will also get rid of any sluggish behaviour you have been having in FCP in this project. There's a good explanation of sizing and downsizing for FCP in this article [www.lafcpug.org]

Two quick points: FCP's limit on stills used to be 4K x 4k. Over that, you take your chances. What does your timeline look like on a television monitor before you go all through the export and coding? Many people get seduced into expecting miracles, but as has been suggested, you only get 720 pixels in the output and that's not a lot.

Also, Compressor works better as a stand-alone encoder than an export function in Final Cut. Export as a stand-alone high-quality PhotoJPEG or Animation movie and then drop into Compressor.

Koz

Oops. Missed a step. You can export your show as a stand-alone QuickTime Movie (not conversion) and that will work too--probably better.

Koz

What does Compressor do? If I drop a exported quicktime movie from FCP into iDVD for example (skipping Compressor) - does not iDVD encode all of the video? Also when you export the movie from FCP just use current settings with DV compression?

<<<What does Compressor do?

Compressor, among a lot of othert talents, produces the two or more elemental stream compressed files (picture and sound) needed to produce a DVD. Compressor needs to get its fingers on the show sooner or later if you're going to use DVD Studio Pro to author and produce a DVD.

Unless:

<<<If I drop a exported quicktime movie from FCP into iDVD for example (skipping Compressor) - does not iDVD encode all of the video?

That's the other way out. Yes, exactly. There is an MPEG2 compressor bult into iDVD and it's not terrible. We produced a number of demo reels for our company that way until we got DVD Studio Pro running. The down side of iDVD is that it's not fancy. If you want to start making recursive animated menus, you're out of luck.

The other down side to iDVD is it's not always stable. You can apply a show that it doesn't like and it will simply halt (but not crash) and leave you hanging out there wondering what happened. That one feature drives a lot of people to DVD Studio Pro.

"The client's in the car. Where the frog is our DVD?!?"


<<<Also when you export the movie from FCP just use current settings with DV compression?>>>

Don't use Conversion.

Export, Stand Alone, Current Settings, QuickTime Movie. QuickTime Movie assumes the timeline settings and produces no damage (this changes with FCP version).

A note on MPEG2. MPEG2 made a lot of modern television possible. It is an extreme destructive process that is necessary to make the HiDef digital television signal small enough to broadcast. That was the whole idea. Everything else fell from that. You can't fit a movie onto a DVD without that technology.

I make the point that it's destructive. They throw some portion of the picture quality away to get MPEG2 to work. That's why DVDs are not a good archival storage medium. The object of the Compressionist is to tune the process so the damage is invisible.

MPEG2 considers Motion expendable. If the Compressionist sees a scene with rapid motion, she will decrease the quality of the image. If the scene has little or no motion, the quality of the image can be quite high. This is what makes compressing a movie so darn much fun. There's no human Compressionist and you or the software has to do everything and one size does not fit all.

There is no simple answer to the question we hear so often: What are good compression settings? It's a juggling act between picture quallity, motion stability, and the fact that if you pack too many bits on the disk, it will stop playing in older players.

Have fun.

Koz