Mastering issues.

Dual 2.26 Quad-core Intel Xenon, 16 GB Ram, too much memory, Matrox MXO2 Mini

I have a thread in the Cafe about my trials and tribulations of exporting a Master for my authoring agent.

I have to deliver a quicktime file of manageable size to my authoring agent for a DVD Master. My authoring agent is PC based(not my fault).

Currently, I have a self-contained QT file in HDV 1440x1080 60i on the desktop at 23GB's. I also have a 175 GB Pro-Res(HQ) version and a 100GB Pro-Res 422 version.

They all look great. I have tried and failed at using QT conversion to output a SD version of the feature directly from FCP.

It has been suggested that I use compressor to down-res my HDV-QT file to Apple Pro-Res SD, though I do not see that as an option in Compressor.

Any help would be appreciated, I'm on a deadline and I need to deliver by Monday(Aug 9) and can't afford a 200 hour render. However, I can't afford to produce a DVD that was shot on HD and end's up looking worse than VHS, I have sponsors to answer to.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You could try this to start with (unzip and double-click to open Compressor):

Compressor Template (ProRes HQ for SD DVD)

I started with this preset:

Apple ProRes 422 for Interlaced material (High Quality)

and changed the Geometry settings to output a 720 x 480 frame size.

Drop either of your ProRes 422 QuickTime movie files into the source well in Compressor and run. Good luck!


-Dave

P.S. - What exactly are you supposed to deliver to the "Authoring Agent"? Does she/he want something already MPEG-2 encoded or is he/she going to do the final encoding to MPEG-2?

P.P.S. - I just saw the other thread. Derek and Jeff summarize things very well (and match what I did in the Compressor file I provided a link to).

Can't open your link.

Can you expand, cut and paste????

Carpboy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Can't open your link.
>
> Can you expand, cut and paste????

I just had someone else test the first link and it downloaded just fine. Anyway, I added a second link to my initial post, containing the full URL.


-Dave

Both just launch my Microsoft Office Picture Manager and there is no new content.

Dave's link works fine.

When the file downloads, it will show up either as

ProRes HQ SD DVD Interlaced.compressor.zip

or

ProRes HQ SD DVD Interlaced.compressor

If it's the first, it needs to be un-zip-ed. Then, double-clicking should launch Compressor. Or, you could drag the file onto the Compressor application icon, or right/control-click and choose "Open with Compressor"...


-Dave

P.S. - Jeff, thanks for verifying things...

My edit bay is not connected to the internet, I'm on my PC laptop!

Carpboy,

are you in CA? My suggestion would be to talk with the authoring agent, write down exactly what he needs, then for you to find a professional compressionist in your area (hopefully on a Saturday there should be some post houses open) and have them to the compression for you. Pay what ever $$ you need. If necessary, bite the bullet and push back your delivery a day or two to get it done correctly.

Best of luck!

Okay, I'm on the Mac now, I've got the download.

Thanks for your help, I'll let the current file finish and then try a down-res with your template.

Thank you!!!!

Carpboy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My edit bay is not connected to the internet, I'm
> on my PC laptop!

Okay, it should be pretty obvious that a Compressor file should be run on a Mac OS X system (where your Final Cut Studio installation is located).

So, move the zip-ed file over to the edit system, uncompress it and then follow my previous instructions.


-Dave

Thanks boydmcc,

but there's no more money. This $6000 Mac has to start paying for itself.

totally understand.

a couple of quick thoughts:

1. when testing the different compression settings, you can go into the preview window and set in and out points so you are running a test on a very small piece of your master (like a minute or so). That way you spend only a few minutes to output a sample to see if it meets your needs.

2. This past year I did quite a bit of HDV-60i stuff that ended up on DVD (via DVDSP). I just converted the HDV QT files in compressor directly to M2V files. They looked fine, more like high quality dv and nothing like VHS. No matter what, when compressing HD to SD, the SD won't look as good as the original HD.

3. To fit 122 minutes of M2V and AC3 audio files on a single sided dvd, you may need to go in an really play with the data rate to get it to fit on a DVD. You really need to check with the authoring agent exactly the maximum size files (and don't forget to add in the size of the audio files, where you may need to reduce the sampling rate) so that it fits on whatever dvd the guy is putting together.

4. Watch the results of your tests on a tv/interlace monitor. (you could even hook up your original footage via your camera to the same monitor and check the test footage against).

D-Mac,

Just dropped your template in, will take 3 1/2 hours to see the results.

The last SD is hard to judge as I'm watching it on porgressive monitors and the combing is horrendous.

>The last SD is hard to judge as I'm watching it on porgressive monitors and the combing is
>horrendous.

Now, that's not something to complain about. You shot interlaced.



www.strypesinpost.com

True 'nuff.

I was too intimidated to shoot 24P, because I had never done it.

Carpboy,

So, once you get an acceptable SD ProRes file, is that what you will give to the authoring agent?

If this person has balked about file sizes being too big, it may be because she/he is expecting to receive an .m2v and .ac3 file pair rather than a source master that needs to be transcoded/compressed?

So, what exactly she/he want?



-Dave

P.S. - As most everyone has already mentioned, the authoring agent should have given you very specific instructions, a "deliverables checklist," etc., if only for his/her peace-of-mind...


P.P.S. - The only way you're going to be able to evaluate the quality of your various versions of your movie is by viewing them on a calibrated external broadcast/TV monitor (that can properly show interlacing) via a proper connection (MXO2 mini should work for that)... all of which you probably know...

The guy barely speaks english, so sometimes I don't know what he's saying even when I'm watching him say it!

His first request was Quicktime file or an SD-DVD! That's all he said.

Then this last go around he asked for MPEG-2.

I know he's PC-based and I cant remember the software, I had never heard of it, or I didn't understand what he said.

dropped the SD version per your template back into FCP and watched on external HD monitor.

Yikes!!!!!

I have got to be doing something wrong, all these renders to SD look atrocious.

You need to define what you mean by "external HD monitor" and "atrocious". Also, when you are monitoring SD, you need to get an SD broadcast monitor. HD monitors don't cut it for SD monitoring.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote
Carpboy
dropped the SD version per your template back into FCP and watched on external HD monitor.

Yikes!!!!!

Is this a calibrated HD monitor (not a computer monitor) or TV that can display proper, interlaced SD footage? Most non-broadcast HD monitors or TVs deinterlace material before displaying it. Remember, scaling up an SD image to fill the screen of an HD monitor (1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720) will soften/blur/pixelate the image to some degree (depending on the TV/monitor quality and its other features).

Quote
Carpboy
I have got to be doing something wrong, all these renders to SD look atrocious.

Maybe you are, maybe you aren't...

"Atrocious" is not a very descriptive term. Do you mean that you see horizontal lines or "combing effects" on a progressive display (like a computer monitor or non-interlaced-capable HD monitor/TV)? Is the image blurry? Do the colors look bad after a particular step?

In order to avoid spending a lot of time just testing (and troubleshooting things), take a representative clip from your QT movie file and use one of the DVD presets in compressor to make a .m2v and .ac3 file, and burn it using DVD Studio Pro or Toast (no-re-encoding in Toast):

- Use a small scene, or whatever, but no more than 5 or 10 minutes.

- You can extract a clip, using QT Player 7 or from within Compressor. Or, you can go back to your FCP project and set in and out points for a small portion of the timeline, then export that as a self-contained QT movie as you did before, then downsize it to SD.

- To make a quick, "screener" DVD of the small clip using DVD Studio Pro (once you've created the .m2v and .ac3 files), follow Gerard's ("strypes" instructions here:

How to burn a simple DVD

This will allow you to play back your sample clip on a regular set-top (standalone) DVD player on a TV set, preferably a CRT-based TV or something that you know shows interlaced footage as interlaced.

-----

So, the idea here is to make sure you are viewing the various "transcoding" stages of your material properly. You may want to do some screen shots and post them, so that we can see what you're talking about.

By using one, or more, sample clips of around 5 minutes (or so) each, it is much easier and quicker to sort out any issues...


-Dave

Okay, First off, thank you all for your responses.

This is the most frustrating part of the whole process for me, I always struggle to get the finished project off the computer and I just can't seem to ever do it right. I've got $30,000 wrapped up in this film and a year of my life and I just keep banging my head against a wall trying to deliver to a Master.

so let me try to fill in some holes.

MAc OS X 10.5.6, Dual 2.26, 16GB Ram, MXO2 Mini, external monitor is a LG Flattron W2361VG 1920x1080, FCP 7.

My project was shot on HDV, SD-DV, and contains additional stock footage that was converted to Pro-Res. HDV was imported native and edited in a Pro-Res timeline. All SD-DV was converted to Pro-Res.

I have exported via QT conversion, an HDV-QT version, a Pro-Res(HQ) version, and a Pro-Res 422 version. The HDV and Pro-Res(HQ) versions when imported back into FCP and viewed on the external monitor are absolutley immaculate. Darn near perfect video! The Pro-Res 422 version, not so good, titles appear out of focus and there's corruption, combing, etc in the images, especially during high-speed or slow-motion portions of the video.

Yesterday, I dropped The Pro-Res version into Compressor and using the Pro-Res codec resized to 720x480. I also used the compressor template supplied above. In both cases, the video was "atrocious". Titles were virtually unreadable or akin to an atari 2600 display and any significant camera movement resulted in uacceptable combing and stair-stepped edges, in some cases the entire screen was a jagged mess, especially in high speed action segments.

I have not been doing anything with the Anti-Alias and Detail Level sliders, they've always been at 0 in all previous cases.

This compression to SD was proposed as an intermediate step before compressing to MPEG-2 or some other format that would give me a manageable file-size for delivery to my Mac-challenged Authoring Agent.

Currently, The computer is resizing the HDV-QT file in compressor using Pro-Res Interlaced(HQ) template, resized to 720x480 NTSC 16:9, with Fram controls at Better, Better, Better. render time is about 6 hours.

With Frame controls all set to best render time is 160 hours.

The questions you're asking now should have been asked long before you had shot a frame.

And then if that weren't possible, they should've been asked at the beginning of editing.

You can't start editing a project not knowing what formats you're going to at the end.

The issues you're describing with the ProRes non-HQ versions don't sound like regular video compression. I think you're doing something wrong in the settings. But at this point, your workflow has been quite a mishmash, it'd be very hard to figure out where things went wrong. For starters, I'm not convinced you're watching the correct monitor; the issues you're describing looks like what happens when you use the wrong monitoring device (eg. like saying a 320x240 file looks bad because it can't fill a 1280x1024 computer monitor.

I would suggest slicing off a small piece of the "atrocious" files you're talking about and making it available for some of the tech whizzes in here to look at. That way they can give you advice based on first-hand knowledge rather than relayed information.

There is a quick and easy way in QuickTime Player Pro to do this. Open the clip, put an In point, go to five or ten seconds afterwards, put an Out point. Copy. APPLE-N to create a new, blank QuickTime document. Paste, Save As with a new name.

And yeah, as Dave said, stop trying to test settings every time with your 90-minute show. Take a five-minute piece and use that as the guinea pig.


www.derekmok.com

Derek is, of course, correct. It's waaaay too late in the game to be thinking about stuff like this. That said, there's nothing to be done about that right now unless you want to feel sorry for yourself. And there's little to be gained from that.

Quote

I have exported via QT conversion

Don't do this. The "Quicktime Conversion" process forces each frame to be decoded and re-encoded, whether you need it or not. I don't even know why the "Quicktime Conversion" option is still in Final Cut. It's been there forever; must be a legacy thing.

Quote

an HDV-QT version

Aggressively encoded formats like HDV, XDCAM, H.264, AVCHD and so on should be considered read-only. You never encode to one of those formats; you only decode from those formats.

Quote

a Pro-Res(HQ) version

Overkill. Blame Apple for choosing to call the higher-bit-rate ProRes 422 format "HQ," which everybody seems to think means "higher quality," like they're going to notice a difference. No average editor will ever see a difference between ProRes 422 and ProRes 422 HQ except in contrived test-to-destruction situations. If you ever need ProRes 422 HQ, you'll know it. Until then, stick with ProRes 422, or even ProRes 422 (LT).

Quote

and a Pro-Res 422 version

This is fine, except, again, for the Quicktime Conversion bit. You don't want to convert anything. You just want to write what you've already created into a Quicktime movie file.

Quote

The Pro-Res 422 version, not so good, titles appear out of focus and there's corruption, combing, etc in the images, especially during high-speed or slow-motion portions of the video.

There are a million possible reasons for this, every single one of which boils down to "you did something wrong." As Derek says, it's not really reasonable for anybody to try to guess what that was based on what you've described so far.

Quote

In both cases, the video was "atrocious". Titles were virtually unreadable or akin to an atari 2600 display and any significant camera movement resulted in uacceptable combing and stair-stepped edges, in some cases the entire screen was a jagged mess, especially in high speed action segments.

Sorry, but none of that actually means anything to anybody but you. I'm not trying to be mean; I mean it literally. That description doesn't tell anybody what you saw. I'll give you a forinstance: You talked about "combing." Are you aware that what most people mean when they use the word "combing" is, in fact, utterly normal? It's a both necessary and beneficial aspect of interlaced video. You'd have a problem if it weren't there. Of course, you wouldn't see this "combing" if you were monitoring on a proper monitor, but that's another issue.

Quote

This compression to SD was proposed as an intermediate step

Let us please be precise with our language. You're not compressing to SD. You're downconverting to SD. While it's technically true that, if you're working in ProRes, each conversion does include a re-compression, ProRes is specifically designed to be transparent across an improbably large number of re-compressions.

Quote

The computer is resizing the HDV-QT file in compressor

Do me a favor? Just delete that Quicktime right now. You have a perfectly good ProRes 422 copy of your timeline sitting right there. Why on earth would you want to use a computationally intensive, heavily compressed, low-quality version instead?

Quote

render time is about 6 hours.

Stop processing your whole feature over and over again! You're wasting days and days. Do what Derek said: Take a representative snippet instead. Do your tests with that.

>I don't even know why the "Quicktime Conversion" option is still in Final Cut.

It's a good thing it's still there. I use it sometimes to generate mpeg-4s for audio mix, as well as exporting stills. I just wish it had an option for you to add timecode. But for final encoding, it is low quality, it is 8 bits, and it recompresses.


>In both cases, the video was "atrocious". Titles were virtually unreadable or akin to an atari 2600
>display and any significant camera movement resulted in uacceptable combing and stair-stepped
>edges

You need to get one of these:

[www.lafcpug.org]

I highly recommend the Apple certified series.


>external monitor is a LG Flattron W2361VG 1920x1080

Just as I suspected. I downloaded D-Mac's file, and there was nothing wrong with it. QT conversion is a "dumb" scaler. It doesn't give a crap about interlacing and just resizes everything as if everything was one progressive frame, so your edges look like crap when you watch it on a proper monitoring system.

I did a quick google, and if you are using one of these, you are out of luck. That's a computer monitor that you are trying to use for video work. You need a broadcast monitor.

[www.lg.com]

Broadcast monitor:

[www.shopfsi.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

Ohyeah, I totally forgot about the stills export thing. Unless there's another, better way in Final Cut 7 as part of the whole "Share" thing, which I've never explored in depth.

[strypesinpost.com]

The share function works sort of like "Send to Compressor", but it lets you get the output straight out to DVD/blu-ray/youtube. So it's more convenient, but with the same drawback as "send to compressor".



www.strypesinpost.com

As I've said before, delivering a Master has always been the problem.

I have diligently tried to do everything I have been told on this board from the time I built the computer, to how I should edit, and now I've got a finished project that looks great on the computer, but I can't do anything with it.

It sounds like I need a new authoring agent who is Mac-based and can handle the big Pro-Res files, is that what I'm hearing???

I can't author it myself, I have absolutely 0 experience with DVD studio Pro and besides I can't even compress, downvert,down-res the file right. Compressor for me has been a total failure and waste of time.

It sounds like I made a mistake immediately on Export. So let's start from the begginning, how should I export the file?

Also, if you know a good Authoring Agent in Sacramento, that would help too!

Hook up a TV to the Matrox output. Not a computer monitor.



www.strypesinpost.com

Carpboy,

At least you transcoded everything and edited in a ProRes timeline in FCP. That was good.

If you did actually use a ProRes timeline in FCP (with proper field order setings, etc.), you should export that directly (once it's been rendered fully), using "File > Export > QuickTime Movie" (and not set it to recompress all frames, and choosing ProRes 422 or ProRes 422 (HQ) as the codec, same as your timeline). This would give you a self-contained QT movie file exactly like you see in your timeline. It shouldn't take too long to accomplish (speed is limited by your hard drives).

As Derek and Jeff (and strypes?) reiterated, you don't want to go back to an HDV QT file (or use QT conversion for export).

-----

If you had the LG computer display connected to your Matrox MXO2 mini via HDMI, you should be able to get a "decent" calibration, using the calibrator tool that's included with the Matrox System Preference (there's a nice little video of this procedure on the Matrox website).

However, you would not get a good view of interlaced footage with this setup, nor will SD footage (downconverted or not) look very good on this monitor. For about $300 (price of this monitor), you are not going to get proper display of interlacing, "dot for dot" display capability, or good scaling of SD video. This display, properly calibrated with the Matrox calibrator, may yield a "decent" image in terms of color, contrast, etc. (but not great).

-----

So, export as a QuickTime movie (don't recompress all frames), using the same settings as your ProRes sequence settings in FCP.

The only way things won't look "atrocious" is if you connect a real SD TV set, or SD broadcast monitor to the Matrox MXO2 (as strypes mentioned). Seriously, getting a decent, used CRT-based TV set on craigslist would do just fine, for now. You'll see properly displayed interlaced footage, whether or not the color is great.

All of this just goes to demonstrate how editing, and associated activities, is as much a technical activity as it is artistic...



-Dave