Will the most anal Compression Person please stand up.

i am working in dv and going to dvd i have tried several setting combinations to improve the final. i know that there are many style to compression. i am looking to improve sharpness and color saturation.

can some one lend me an old geeks receipt for the best results with 4:1:1?? i come out of fcp normally thru compressor to get the .m2v file.

i will need to know if there is something that i can do in compressor and then some particulars to do in dvdsp4.

thanx muches

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

I'm not anal about anything but since nobody's talking to me LOL, I'll oblige you with a reply.

First of all, always open up compressor and then drag your movie into it. In other words, don't open up Compressor via FCP.

You will have more control over what you're doing working straight out of the Compressor.

The quality of your DVD encoding can be improved easier if you have a short film as compared to a two hour feature. So first tell me what's the length of your movie before I give you a detailed recipe for Compression.

But here are some general recommendations if you have a short movie -- like 5-30 minutes. Go for the closest preset to the length of your movie -- so 90 minutes Best Compressor settings for mpeg2 when choosing preferences.

Choose best compression, 2 pass, highest quality settings across the board.

Let me know the length of your movie...

movie length is odd but ill try to explain.

i have 4 shows that will be shown in a network format meaning:

each show ranges from 12 - 22min shows.

i have 10, 30sec spots. these spots will break up the show in 2 places very much like commercials on tv during a 30min show.

3, 5min spots.

all shows will be chapter marked at its beginning and sub chaptering the breaks.

in a perfect world i would do some type of sub-chapter markers for the commercials.

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i have constructed each show already. i was planning on dropping every show into 1 timeline and then cutting them so that i would have 2, 2min blank spots to drop the spots in then chapter ( and sub-chapter ) marking it to send to dvdsp4. i was also gonna try to use the story feature to construct a commercial free version but thats not as important to the output as simply having each segments chapter mark.

let me know if you need other info.

ps. here is my burner info i dont think it is DL capable.

Firmware Revision: A606
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipped/Supported)
Cache: 2000 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -RW, +R, +RW
Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes
Burn Underrun Protection DVD: Yes
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO
Media: No

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

I posted a number of times about our experiences in the transition from "dv" quality video to SDI Uncompressed in our DVDs. That is the one place with the biggest bang for the quality buck. Anything you do with DV is doomed to trying to make dual conversion look good--that is, starting with compressed work (dv) and then compressing it further for the DVD.

There is a technique where you drag the exported movie directly into DVDSP and let it call the compression tools. I know nothing about that, but it's supposed to be the most efficient of all the ways.

Encoding processes do not affect color--or at least they're not supposed to. If you want to compress by hand, you will be using the maximum possible bitrate for the video that doesn't go over 7. If the show doesn't fit on the disk if you do that at fixed bit rates, then you get to experiment with dual-pass variable bit rates, compression markers, etc. Scenes with high motion do not need high quality video. Scenes with no motion can look beautiful. You don't generally get both unless your show is under about one hour.

If you do this just right, you should need to go outside about every two hours and scream. I don't know anybody putting the DVDSP presets up for high quality awards. We gave up on Compressor and went back to the older machine with the FCP MPEG2 Export.

Koz

Quote
koz
There is a technique where you drag the exported movie directly into DVDSP and let it call the compression tools. I know nothing about that, but it's supposed to be the most efficient of all the ways.

is the exported movie a self-contained qt(mp2) file or is it an fcp qt file?

when it enters dvdsp my default max bit rate says 7.0 but the bit rate say 4.0. Am i to change the 4.0 to say 6.3? i found these settings under preferences>mpeg2 sd.[/

Quote
koz
Scenes with high motion do not need high quality video.

i may not ask this right.

would this mean that some where in dvdsp there are compression markers for high motion scenes or does it mean that i dont need compression markers in fcp pre-export?i normally use compression markers for 3 vtracks or more in fcp.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

I believe you can export a Final Cut Movie from your timeline and drop that directly in Studio Pro as an asset. I have never done that with these fingers, so this is hearsay.


<<<when it enters dvdsp my default max bit rate says 7.0 but the bit rate say 4.0. Am i to change the 4.0 to say 6.3? i found these settings under preferences>mpeg2 sd.[/ >>>

You should never let anything go over 7 because that's the bitrate where older DVD players spit up. They can't handle the high number. 4 (in this case) is the average bitrate given an average show. We do use a higher number, I think 6.0 or 6.2. You can use a fixed bitrate of 7 and not have to worry about double or single pass or average or peak bitrates at all. Everything happens at 7.00. That's how iDVD works. Compression is completely automatic, but the show can't ever go over one hour at that quality.


Long theatrical movies have to be hand adjusted (on realtime hardware compressors) to look good.

As an example only, they first compress the movie so it's perfect in every way. Then, when that won't fit on the DVD, they go back and sacrifice picture quality and sharpness of the rapid motion scenes and motion accuracy in the pretty scenes. All this happens in real time or faster. Commercial compressionists have no rendering or export delays.

Two back to back scenes in Dr Zhivago are the example. In one, the revolutionaries are battling the csar's troups and everything in the scene is violently moving. The next scene is a quiet external of a Russian farmhouse. Those two scenes are compressed **very** differently to make the movie fit. There is no visual quality in the battle scene and there is no motion accuracy in the farmhouse scene.

Do you get the temporal compression idea? MPEG2 doesn't send all the video frames you shot. It sends one real good frame and then a list of changes. If you shoot a natural but non-moving scene and freeze the camera motion, MPEG2 will produce one frame of high quality and duplicate it 16 times. That's how the farmhouse scene works. Obviously, you can't do that in the battle scene. There you have to reduce the quality of the pictures a lot and send or nearly each frame.

There are a lot of other compression tricks. Areas of one color compress really well, etc. etc. etc.


I understand you can put compression markers inside your Final Cut show now so you can tune the compression and change it scene by scene. I don't know how that actually works. The preview window in DVDSP is supposed to let you tune the compresson and watch it change. We've gotten some surprises by depending on that.


So you start to understand why everybody grins when we get the post: "What are the best compression settings for my show?"

Koz

ok, heres what i am thinking about this info

so in dvdsp i can set markers where i feel that it needs more or less compreesion. i am in the belief that there are low and hi compression markers in dvdsp.

i use more ompression where scenes are chaotic and less in areas where you need the detail and color.

bit rates above 7 can not be played by older dvd players. bite rates set to a 7 average can not exceed 1hr.

i am also guessing that if i need to make an 1:40:00 dvd i could probly get away with a 6 average bit rate.

am i wrong on these things?

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

<<<so in dvdsp i can set markers where i feel that it needs more or less compression. i am in the belief that there are low and hi compression markers in dvdsp. >>>

That's my understanding. I'm no celebrated expert on these tools. I just know generically what's supposed to happen.

<<<bite rates set to a 7 average can not exceed 1hr. >>>

That's close. One of the options in most compressors is to use a Fixed Bit Rate instead of Variable Bit Rate. That's that "VBR" thing. If you *don't* use VBR, you pick one number and the compressor squeezes the whole show to that number. There is no Peak or Average. iDVD restricts you to approximately one hour of show time if you do that. That number is fuzzy, too. If you insist on creating thousands of animated clicky buttons in the menus, you may only be able to have a half-hour show. Everything takes up room.

Fixed Bit Rate works really well assuming the show will fit on the disk. If it doesn't, then you start the Custom Setting dance. VBR with 7 as peak and Some Other Number as the average. Two Pass VBR is excellent--that's where the compressor goes back and forth over the show several times to make sure it got all the numbers optimum--but it takes forever compared to Single Pass VBR. You trade Time for Quality.

That's another place we get a chuckle post. "What's the fastest way I can get the best show?" Fast, Good, Cheap. Pick two. You can crank out an excellent show in almost real time, but it will cost you a professional compression station to do it. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars.


DVDSP does some things I don't particularly like. The older MPEG2 Export from Final Cut used to have relatively simple sliders, clickys and text entry boxes for you to put your choices in. Those are hidden in DVDSP with the idea that your're going to pick "60 Minutes" (for example) and it will pick all the numbers for you. I don't know what those numbers really mean, and I don't know how to tune the compression markers.

Yes, I know. Big help. Sorry, that's as good as I can get. I do know from some experiments that the reason DVDSP goes as slow as it does is that the current versions don't know how to use the second processor in a two-processor machine.


The best thing we ever did was get an old, complete piece of crap, stand-alone DVD player for our technical area. It has incontinence, arthritis, irritable bowel, and it won't play questionable disks. At all. That one machine weeded out bad burners, funny compression rates, and cheap blank disks over several months. Best investment we ever made.

Koz