Stuttering text and animation after burning with Toast

Hi,
yesterday I finished my presentation clip and was very frustrated to learn that after exporting with quicktime conversion (I tried DV Pal and H.264) and burning a DVD with Toast it stuttered when I tested it on my DVD player! While scrolling the text stuttered and the animation (a turning earth e.g.) too.
I tried several things like making a PAL and a NTSC version, lowering the Mbps rate and asking for 'faster' instead of better...nothing worked.
That never happened before. What have I done wrong?

The sequence I exported was a mix of 2 Maya animations, captured DV Pal footage and stills.

what do you normally do when making a DVD?

the recommended way is to export as a Quicktime movie, current settings, self contained,
then do your compression, etc (or toasting)

this gives best quality with least amount of work,
and avoids you making some mistake with the QT conversion settings.
it could have been a wrong field order setting that produced the fluttering, but i'm only guessing.

was the fluttering on everything, or just the text and animation?
where did those elements come from? (where they a different format to the rest of your show)


nick

I usually do the exact same thing and the clips and trailers are even great too watch in my home cinema.
I think it's because of the Maya animations...it's gotta be the reason cause it was the first time I used these.
the fluttering was just on the text and animation...which makes about 90% of the presentation
the Pal footage I captured had the same format though some was 10 years old. The Maya clips were also on Pal and 720x576 and 768x576.
wait, I tried exporting with QT and making a self-contained movie...I'll burn it now and tell you if it's better...

now...it was a LITTLE better. the movie clip was 4,6 GB big, but it didn't help. Has anyone tipps on how to deal with Maya animations when exporting/burning to DVD?

Katrin, how are you monitoring out of FCP?

you need to be checking this on an external TV type monitor.
the problem could be in the animation BEFORE it hits the DVD,
(which i take it you are checking on a TV?)


nick

this time I did not monitor it at all. I DO have an external monitor though, a Trinitron. I'll check if the fluttering shows there...
and yes, I checked the DVD on a HD TV.

it's not fluttering when monitoring it on my external monitor!!
what does that mean?
do I need to compress the large Maya files BEFORE exporting it together with the whole sequence?

Hi Katrin,

The first thing you need to do is to check your settings, change your sequence to 8 bit uncompressed for the final QT export and use Compressor instead of Toast to take care of MPEG -conversion. Also, make a disk image in Toast to preview it on your computer instead of burning straight to disc. This will let you troubleshoot more easily.

+

A lot of home-made and semi-pro 3D stuff is done with low framerate to cut down render time. Usually 15 fps is quite enough to display some suave 3D moves on the screen. DVDs have a higher framerate and long Gop structure. It wrecks havoc on material originating from 15 fps source and causes inevitable stutter during playback.

I'll do all that and report!
The Maya animations have been done with 25fps to fit into the rest of the sequence.

I don't know if anyone is still reading this, I just wanted to say that it worked this time. I've edited my first bigger project (for a big birthday party of a CEO but still...) and I faced the same problems again.
Then I did exactly as you guys advised here: output with QT, current settings (pro res), self contained and put it into Compressor, then I built and formatted it in DVD studio and voila: no stuttering anymore
thank you.

I make it a habit also after burning a DVD to take it out of the computer and play it on at least 2 different set top boxes through a standard TV to QC it (quality control)

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Will do that too! thanks