Apple Pro Res to DVD issues.

[Walter Biscardi]

Never heard of this. We make DVDs and BluRay discs from ProRes timelines on a weekly basis.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” featuring Sigourney Weaver coming soon.

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[Ted Ryan]

Gotcha, Walter.

Thanks for responding.

[John Pale]

[Ted Ryan] “‘ve heard a rumor that if you try to make a DVD in DVD Studio Pro coming from any type of Apple Pro Res Sequence, you’re going to run into an issues and lots of interlacing.
“

I haven’t heard about this, but I heard a rumor that using ProRes HQ on SD footage will make you go blind.

Seriously, I don’t know how rumors like that get started. People use ProRes all the time with no issues like that. Not that FCS doesn’t have it share of bugs, but sheesh…don’t you think the Cow’s servers would be melting down with posts about the inability to MPEG encode anything acquired or edited in ProRes?

[Michael Allen]

I often have problems. I have to render the HD edited program in a standard Def. sequence before sending to compressor.

That said, at work I shoot F350’s in XDcam HD and from that timeline I can export SCM and import to compressor with great results.

However, at home I go Z5u through Kona directly to prores. If I export the edited SCM and then import to compressor, my resulting DVD looks very bad with sort of an interlacing looking problem (text is not smooth and video quality is bad.) But if I go from HD prores sequence to SD prores sequence (letting FCP do downres) then to compressor, the resulting DVD’s look great. I don’t think, from what I have read, that this is an entirely uncommon problem.

If there is a better workflow than re-rendering in SD sequence, please let me know. I don’t have to do this at my coorporate gig when going from XDcam HD to compressor so unfortunatly I am not sure exactly what the problem really is.

FYI, I do keep it 29.97 all the way through, but it still sucks without the downconversion step.

Mike

[Michael Sacci]

Most people’s interlace issue is easily solved by changing the field dominance in Compressor. HD is upper and SD NTSC is lower so it is easy to introduce an issue. If you export as self contained, current settings then take that into Compressor, with a m2v preset change the field dominance to UPPER and it should all be fine.

[Dean Sensui]

The rumors are false.

I’ve done lots of projects and the results are just fine.

Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing

[Walter Biscardi]

[Mike Allen] “I have to render the HD edited program in a standard Def. sequence before sending to compressor.”

That is the worst possible workflow you can do for an HD timeline to DVD. We have never had an issue with Compressor taking a 1080 or 720 timeline and recompressing directly to an MPEG-2 for SD DVD.

When you drop an HD timeline into an SD one, FCP is absolutely terrible at the rescaling necessary and you’re likely to introduce interlacing issues. This is the method we have been using here for 5 or 6 years now.

https://forums.creativecow.net/faq/applefinalcutpro#52

in fact I created two DVDs and a BluRay from the same HD timeline yesterday using this exact method for the DVD.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” featuring Sigourney Weaver coming soon.

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Posts by walterbiscardi

[Devin Crane]

The other day I sent a Pro Res SD project to Compressor and did a 2 pass encode, when imported into DVDSP the audio was longer than the Video. Went back and did a 1 pass encode and it worked fine. As far as interlacing problems I didn’t see any.

[Michael Allen]

Walter, I know you are one of many that would most certainly be considered an expert at this process. Unfortunatly, I am not having the same experience. Let me give some more detail. I do not see this problem with exporting a 23.98 progressive HD program to compressor and the problem does manifest as looking like an interlacing issue. So one of the suggestions was to change the compressor preset to insure that it is set to upper field first. Well I just did a test and the preset in compressor is set to Auto by default. It did correctly check my program and it assigned an upper field first setting to the 29.97 HD program I was trying to compress. I will test to see results, but at this point it looks like compressor is setting field order correctly.

Also, you can scan the web and see many posts where others have had the exact same problem (even though you and other professionals have not ever experienced it yourself). Another thing I will do is actually change the preset to force upper field first and see if that effects the outcome. Are there other default settings say under the: DVD:Best Quality 120min. preset that might need to be changed. By the way, the HD sequence plays perfectly in FCP, my problem is the resulting DVD from a 29.97 HD sequence.

Please note that I do not doubt that I am doing something wrong, I am just atempting to figure out what I am doing wrong. My only solution thus far is to downres in a FCP SD sequece. I absolutly do not want to recompress this way, I have to be loosing quality, however it is the only way I have found to create good looking DVD’s from my 29.97 HD sequence.

Thanks for your help,

Mike

[David Heidelberger]

There were some Compressor downconversion issues when FCP 7 first came out having to do with aliasing. Here’s an example. This is 720p24 ProRes footage downconverted to SD 24p, obviously using the exact same settings in Compressor 3.0.5 (FCP 6.0.6) and Compressor 3.5 (FCP 7). Although I haven’t done side-by-side comparisons, I believe I read in a release note that this issue was fixed in FCP 7.0.1/Compressor 3.5.1, although I can’t seem to find the release notes for that version right now. Are you using the latest version of Final Cut and Compressor?