image "stutters" on some players (monitors?)

Every now and then, I'll play a perfectly good disc of my cut on someone else's DVD player, and the picture skips and jumps horribly, especially during horizontal pans. I suspect it might have something to do with the de-interlacing filter I've applied, but why does it play fine in some situations and not others? If hi-def equipment is the culprit, are there any settings that can be changed to address the problem?

Is it flat screens that you're seeing this in? This is a common complain with some types of TV. If your video plays fine on a CRT, then it's fine. There's nothing you can do about other people's viewing equipment.

Yes -- flat screen, high-def. Would you agree that a de-interlaced version of the cut exacerbates the problem; i.e., would it have made any difference had I not used the filter? (unfortunately I didn't have a back-up of the latter on hand to find out).

If I remember correctly ? somebody please call me on this if I'm mistaken ? DVDs only support two frame rates: 29.97 interlaced, or 23.976 progressive. DVDs have no support for 29.97 progressive. If you feed a 29.97 progressive source movie to a DVD encoder like Compressor, it'll almost certainly play back the movie as if it had been interlaced. Which can result in motion artifacts on playback. Depends on what kind of display you're using.

But I don't think that alone would create what you described here. Skips and jumps? Doesn't sound like interlacing artifacts to me.

We have a very old Panasonic DVD player available and outgoing work has to play on this old thing before delivery.

It will not play disks with too high an encoding bit rate. Those disks tend to stutter and break up on some players but not others. This is how we found that the "Super High Quality" setting on our stand-alone DVD burner would produce target practice disks more often than not. Reduce the quality just a bit and all is forgiven.

If you get to pick the rate, never go over 7. Also it can help if you use the Dolby sound in stereo mode rather than the PCM sound which takes up more room and is harder to play.

Of course, you could have interlace problems. That damage only shows up during theatrical motion.

Koz

The problem occurred on ultra-new equipment, so I'm not sure it's the same problem. But I'll try using a lower encoding bit rate, as you suggest. How does one do this within FCP -- by changing the Record selection in Playback Control from "full quality" to "playback settings?" or by changing Master Templates and Motion Projects in User Preferences to a lower quality?

Or some other way?

Unless you have Final Cut 4.5HD or before, your MPEG2 coding happens in Compressor. The newer Compressors hide all those numbers behind settings like "Super Cool," "Really Good," or "Just OK".

Very Mac.

I personally would go down to my local Staples and get a short stack of Sony® DVD-R disks and try those. The original blank stock makes an enormous difference. We went through a great many different makers and settled on Sony and Ridata/Ritek. Sony comes better packaged. We lost too many Riteks before they even got to the burner.

"Hey! These are all scratched..."

Literally in the last week, somebody oozed some non-Sony disks into the pipeline without telling us and the Quality Control failed immediately.

"Is the video supposed to stutter and break up like that?"


You know reading the original post, you could still have interlacing problems. They're at their worst during fast horizontal motion and the effect changes with the display. I gotta come up with a good test for that. Do you ever get colored blocks sprinkled over the picture and freezing, broken motion?

Do you know how to tell pulldown problems with the 100% canvas thing?

Koz

It's looking more and more like de-interlacing is the culprit, but thanks for the compressor info and tips on DVD's. Incidentally, do I have to remove a filter clip by clip, or is there some global way to do it, since it's been applied to the entire sequence?