Do I still need to settle for less with Compressor?

Dear LAFCPUG crew

Our feature "Imagination" is going to hit the film festival circuit soon and, unfortunately, we may have to submit a DVD of the film for exhibition should we be chosen in a few weeks for festival inclusion. We would prefer to exhibit on Digibeta for higher resolution, although it is not listed as an analog exhibiting format.

Since this would be the film's world premiere. I want to try and achieve the highest resolution possible. From my last dealings a few months back with FCP guru's like Larry Jordan, I am aware that, due to problems in Compressor 2, I have to settle for the 1-Pass VBR, motion estimation "better", which definitely caused some of the stop-motion animation in this film to flicker and/or pixilate.

I checked for updates and don't see any recent additions or fixes. I would need to deliver the DVD just before march 1st. I don't want to risk changing my Compressor settings, but I hate to have to deliver the film like this. Can someone help or at least confirm that, indeed, I should still be using these settings?

Thanks

Jeffrey

Have you tried a 2 pass yet? Also why not bypass compressor and let DVD Studio Pro encode your movie?

Michael Horton
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And remind us why you're making a DVD again? Almost any tape format north of VHS will be better than the best DVD.

If you do try Studio Pro, make sure you set the Compressor settings first in preferences, and than open a new project.

How long is your project? If it's not significantly long, (hour or so) you can just throw a lot of bandwidth at it and skip the Dual-Pass. Although, I still always do a Dual-Pass if i have the time...

Also if it's under an hour you will increase your quality greatly by doing CBR (constant bit rate) instead of VBR. I don't know why, but the sound of the phrase "2-pass VBR" seems to make people think it's better quality than CBR. It isn't. It's a way to shave corners and fit more on the disk, that's all. It should be better than 1-pass VBR, but never better than CBR.

You obviously want a good DVD no matter what, but if it were me I 'd still be looking into other delivery methods for a serious festival screening.

Can't you just drag the FCP Pro movie into
DVD Studio and it will encode it for you;
bypassing Compressor totally

The most current version of Compressor has fixed the 2 pass VBR issue. Just used it on a 100 min doc a few weeks ago. No Problems.

-CHL

Chi-Ho Lee
Film & Television Editor
Apple Certified Final Cut Pro Instructor

Quote
The most current version of Compressor has fixed the 2 pass VBR issue. Just used it on a 100 min doc a few weeks ago. No Problems.

The most current version of Compressor is 2.3, correct? The film will be 70 minutes with credits. Since this is still very close to 1 hour, should I use 2 pass VBR or CBR?

I personally don't know much about analog tape formats and should've mentioned that the festival does accept Betacam SP. Is the quality of Betacam SP significantly greater than DVD? I know Digibeta is, but I don't think we can enter it as that.

Also, with Compressor 2.3, can I also set the "motion estimation" to "best", or should I leave it at "better'? This may be affecting the animation...

Lastly, I thought I read that DVD Stuidio Pro's mpeg-2 capabilities aren't as advanced as that of Compressor. I mean, if that wasn't true, then what would be the point of keeping Compressor alive?

<<<I thought I read that DVD Stuidio Pro's mpeg-2 capabilities aren't as advanced as that of Compressor.>>>

Correct me, but all these tools are standing atop the same QuickTime Libraries. You used to be able to run the tools directly in QuickTime Export. we would kill to get that back. Each application supplies its own controls, but if you select the same process, you should get the same results. This is also one of the reasons that awkwardly crossing upgrade and version numbers in QT/FCP/OS is a screaming bad idea.

You run into Constant Bit Rate problems strictly with room. If the show at CBR exceeds about 4G, it's just not going to fit on the physical DVD. Never encode larger than 7 because if you do, you might peel off all the older DVD players which can't handle it. The fancy-pants compression tools are there so you can cram your four-hour movie with six audio channels onto one dual layer disk.

Compressor is a scheduler/batch processor. If you have one movie, do it directly in Studio Pro. One of the operators in our shop piles all our web streaming compression jobs in Compressor and goes to lunch. All the jobs are finished when he gets back.

Koz

jeffleiser Wrote:
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> I personally don't know much about analog tape
> formats and should've mentioned that the festival
> does accept Betacam SP. Is the quality of Betacam
> SP significantly greater than DVD? I know Digibeta
> is, but I don't think we can enter it as that.

Absolutely absolutely take BetaSP.

You still want to know how to make a good DVD, but the whole DVD scheme is designed to just barely fool us into thinking it looks good. It's a very fine line, which works very well for its purpose when used carefully. You don't have the opportunity to bring BetaSP into somebody's living room. You do have that opportunity at the festival.

Betacam SP it is, then, but I would still like to know if I should leave motion estimation at "better", as perhaps this was causing the animation to flicker.

We will be approaching distibutors not long after film festivals have run the film, so obviously, at the end of the day, people will see this film on DVD, not Betacam. And we want to present the film as professionally as possible for the distributor.

I believe this is Compressor's version of what the grownup standards converters call "Motion Prediction."

The classic problem when you're going from PAL to NTSC is the transition from a medium that doesn't do motion well to one that does. The older television converters would sense theatrical motion and blur the frames so the error wasn't as noticable. the New Way is to do the heavy calculations and actually create new frames with the football (for example) existing in a place on an NTSC frame that didn't exist on the PAL frames before or after. The football looks much more realistic than just turning into a smudge job during the pass.

That's what it's supposed to do and on the high end converters, it does.

Compressor got something of an odd reputation because those calculations can cause "swimmy" video rather than just fill in the action holes. That's probably why they put a slider there. Try the adjustment in several places during rapid motion. That's where wacky things happen. We also like to try the adjustment at its extremes to see what it looks like when it's clearly wrong.

Koz