Hey guys, just completed my first big project in DVDSP3, wanted to share my experience and see if I could have done anything different...
First off, the program itself is great. After taking a short class to familiarize myself with it I find it very intuitive and easy to use, at least the basic functions. Apart from designing the menus and graphics I was able to build the disc structure very quickly.
Encoding and building took longer than expected. I had a 1.5 hour main program and several short pieces that added up to almost 2 hours total, maxing out a DVD-5. The ref movie from FCP took 1.5 hours on it's own, then another 2.5 hours to encode to MPEG-2. The short pieces went faster but the disc still took another 1.5 hours to build and burn. So I had to allow for over 6 hours to burn a disc, and if there were changes I had to start all over again. At least it re-uses portions of the Video_TS at the end which saves time. And I converted all my audio from AIFF to AC3 which really freed up a lot of room.
My biggest frustration was the encoding process. When I first started the disc I dragged my ref movies into DVDSP and let them background encode. The files looked OK but it's annoying that it gives you no idea of how long it will take. On one aborted attempt I imported the video and set it up to burn after it finished encoding, then went to bed thinking I would wake up to a finished disc. Six hours later the build was still at 30%!
So Compressor seems the better route, because you have more options and you have a better idea of how long things will take. But high-quality encoding can take forever! That 1.5 hour piece was going to take 5 hours to encode at 2-pass VBR, 4Mbps. I finally settled on 1-pass VBR with Best motion at 4 Mbps with a max of 5 Mbps, which took the usual 2.5 hours to encode. Still, I'm unhappy with the results. The brightly lit scenes look fine, but most of the scenes take place on a somewhat dimly lit stage in a nightclub with lots of movement (shot on DV at 60i) and while the Best setting cleaned up most of the motion artifacts there are jaggies along all the edges -- nothing looks completely "clean." And there is a slight stuttering quality to the footage, as if it was slowed down; seems like a by-product of the motion adjustment.
Ultimately the client was happy but I still hate how it all looks. I know that MPEG compression can get pretty lossy, and I wasn't exactly working with high-end source material. But do you think there was any chance at improving the final product? Would like to hear some opinions...
JK
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