HD to Standard DVCam

I have a number of clips given to me on a harddrive that are HD 16:9 that I am trying to get to a Standard DVCam 4:3 format and have it look somewhat decent. I tried just bringing a clip in, reducing its size and rendering but it looks terrible. I understand I can do this a lot better using Compressor but I have not fully figured out Compression (never had a need to use it in 12 years of editing). I also imported them into MPEG Streamclip and used a variety of settings, with no better result. (result: plays fine, meaning it does not stall, but not smoothly at all).
Can you give me some suggestions on how I can get the scenes to look decent?

As long as you're not changing frame rates, Compressor ain't scary. You just need to set your output format, turn frame controls on and set the scaling property to whatever "best" is ? I think it's called "motion compensation" or similar language.

The only real choice you have to make is whether you want letterboxed or anamorphic footage.

I kinda got that far but could not find a pace to send the movie. When I've made all the settings, how to I initiate the compression, then how do I send the movie to another harddrive?

It sounds ? with all due respect ? like you need to start with the Compressor manual. All the basics are covered there. But to answer your questions, the two things you want are the "Target -> Destination -> Other" menu item and the "Submit" button.

(Compressor is a front-end application to the Qmaster distributed-processing compression engine, so you don't "start" a job, you "submit" it to the queue.)

I have no problem reading the manual, but it seemed pretty intuitive. I did set the Destination in Target (my external harddrive), but when I hit Submit, up comes a box that says "One or more jobs have no target". If I set the target, why is this box coming up? If I can get past this, I think the problem will be solved.

> I did set the Destination in Target (my external harddrive), but when I hit Submit, up comes a
> box that says "One or more jobs have no target".

Most likely you put the Target in the wrong place. Ever since Compressor 3, the interface has gotten a bit more complicated. If you have a Target location within the job "bubble" (sorry, I'll have to admit I don't know the proper name for that thing -- basically, the large light-blue area that gets created when you drag a file in), but it's separate from the setting "ribbon" (the narrow strip within the larger area) that appears, then Compressor won't submit the job.

Make sure that, after you choose a setting, you CONTROL-click on the actual "ribbon" itself which contains the compression settings. Or, if you're dragging a Destination preset, drop it onto the smaller area, not the large area.

I've always found it to be a dumb design, actually. You still can't drop one Destination preset onto multiple jobs/files at once. I had to compress about 500 HD clips and conform all of them to ProRes HQ a few months ago, and you had to click every single "ribbon" to make the Destination stick.


www.derekmok.com

In the compressor Jobs window, all clips need to have a form of compression applied, and a destination. Look at the clips you added to compressor (the large, rounded rectangle). Each one should have at least one thin, rounded rectangle inside the large rectangle. That's the compression preset. In the thin rectangle, at the left, you'll see the preset name (ie: DV NTSC). Then there'll be a dividing line, and then you should see the folder name of your destination (ie: compressed located at: mydrive/documents/compressed). Then another dividing line followed by a box containing the file name for the new clip.

If you don't see something in all three places, then it won't submit. Or if you have more than one clip in your job window, but you haven't applied a preset to one of them, it won't submit.

The easiest thing to do is simply drag the preset you want from the settings window (CMD+3) directly on top the clip in the jobs window. It will apply the default destination which is the same place that the source video comes from.

Andy

Quote
derek
You still can't drop one Destination preset onto multiple jobs/files at once. I had to compress about 500 HD clips and conform all of them to ProRes HQ a few months ago, and you had to click every single "ribbon" to make the Destination stick.

Actually Derek, you can. There are two ways to do it. Create a destination in the Destination window (CMD+4) and then make it the default destination in the compressor preferences. Then select all the clips in your batch window (CMD+A) and drag your preset onto one clip and it will be applied to all the clips with your destination as the default.

The other way, if you don't want to create a default destination is to select all the clips in the batch window (CMD+A), and then go up to the Target menu and choose: Destination/Other... and just pick where you want it to go. It'll change all the targets of all the clips selected to the new destination.

Andy

> Then select all the clips in your batch window (CMD+A) and drag your preset onto one clip and it
> will be applied to all the clips with your destination as the default.

Okay, so I could be missing something here...but whenever I did APPLE-A, it selected the big "bubbles"...and then when you drag the Destination preset onto them, they get applied wrong (onto the big "bubbles", not the narrow "strips" -- the presets are made into separate "strips" and "Submit" will fail.

The way I did it after this snafu was to single-click every ribbon, then CONTROL-click and choose Destination. It still necessitated clicking on every individual clip, instead of all the jobs at once. I did make a Default Destination back in the day, but it still didn't solve the "bubbles vs. ribbons" problem.

Hell, if somebody can point out a better way, something I'm missing, I'd be very happy.


www.derekmok.com

You don't DRAG a destination preset. You go up to the Target menu (where the application menus are) and choose Destination/Other... from the menu options. It's not a drag and drop procedure.

The drag preset that you quoted me on is regarding using a default preset. If you have a default set, then you can select all the clips and drag a COMPRESSION preset (not a destination preset) on top of a "bubble" and it'll apply the same compression and default destination to all clips.

Andy