• Compression Techniques

  Compressing a 12 minute video for best quality DVD

  Posted by Heather Disco on November 15, 2012 at 5:09 am

  I am new to posting at the forum so I hope this is the proper place to do this. I am in serious need of some help compressing an 11 minute 27 second video to be burned to DVD with the best quality possible.

  The video was edited on a new iMac in FCP 6 and because I have that studio collection, I am working with Compressor version 3.0.5 but none of the presets give me very good quality (turns out pretty pixely on DVD).

  I know nothing about the ins and outs of Compressor, I usually just use it when converting home videos to DVD for customers at my store, but those are always 90 min or longer so if you have suggestions, assume I am a rookie who needs very detailed explanations.

  I am wondering if anyone can help me best tweak the settings so that my video quality is the best it can be? I would like to do this in my current version of Compressor but as an absolutely last resort I am willing to buy Compressor 4 from the app store – I would like to not do that if at all possible.. but even if I do I will still need to know how to tweak its settings accordingly.

  Thanks so much for help in advance, and let me know if you need any more info from me.

  Heather Disco replied 13 years, 9 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Craig Seeman

  November 15, 2012 at 7:32 am

  I’m using ancient and what may be inaccurate memories sine Studio 2 came out in 2007 I believe. But I believe the version of Compressor you have, had an issue with 2 Pass VBR encoding. I’d recommend trying a 1 Pass CBR encode of about 6.5mbps or some would push it to 7mbps.

  It’s also possible that you’re downscaling from HD. Consider reading the sticky at the top of this forum on getting the fastest help since our responses can only be as good as the information you provide.
• 

  Heather Disco

  November 15, 2012 at 8:17 pm

  Thanks for the quick response.

  I read the file (didn’t see it before so thank you) and here is my source codec:

  Format: H.264, 1,920 x 1,080
  Linear PCM, 16 bit little-endian signed integer, 48000 Hz, Stereo (L R)

  FPS: 16.63

  Data Size: 937.3 MB

  8.04 Mbit/s

  Does that help in any way? As far as destination codec I really don’t know what I would write. I don’t know much about specifics of encoding so I am not sure what 2 pass VBR is or what 1 Pass CBR is either. I looked around in Compressor and I can’t figure out how to change things like “6.5 mbps”. I have no idea how to set up custom compressions.

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