Bad quality conversion from DV sequence to UnCompressed Output

[Mark Maness]

Well, first of all you are working with DV. Anything better than DV is just wasted time and unnessary. You can’t make the output look any better by outputing it to uncompressed. If your timeline is set to DV, then export using the settings of the timeline and your video should look just fine. The motion and the quality problem you are having, I would have to say that you might have the uncompressed Quicktime settings set to low for the quality you want. Sometimes the default Quicktime settings aren’t right for your needs.

Think of it this way. You need to move a couple of tape machines and you have an SUV to use. That works great, but you choose to use an eighteen wheeler instead. Why? The SUV will work just fine. Now, I’m talking about quality of the video. You can’t make it better but you can make it worse.

If you want to export to uncompressed, then you need to edit in uncompressed. But now, if you edit in uncompressed and want to export to DV, that’s fine but you will be degrading the quality of your video.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[David Bogie]

what Wayne said.

What is your target output and why are your going there?
What is your target presentation device or system?

These are the factors (among others) that determine your export settings. If you can tell us where you’re going and why, we can give you some helpful advice.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Graeme Nattress]

You probably exported “using Quicktime conversion”, which is to be avoided, as you’re incurring a Y’CbCr to RGB to Y’CbCr conversion, and the stuttering is either a wrong frame rate setting, or your hard drive can’t cope with uncompressed.

For getting DV to uncompressed, I’d recommend copying your sequence to an uncompressed seq in FCP, or changing the compression settings of your seq to uncompressed, and then export -> quicktime movie, accept defaults.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Nick Ryan]

It’s like this: The editor across the hall is the main editor for the show, which is cut and printed on his workstation. I, however, am assigned the task of promos – which I cut on my machine, and then give to him via a Quicktime file. He works in UnCompressed, my material is available in DV. Obviously there’s a difference in quality but our producers don’t seem to care.

If I give him a DV Quicktime then he has to re-render every time he moves it around – thus my goal of seeking a decent-looking DV-to-UnCompressed export.

[Mark Maness]

What Graeme said works just fine. I’ve done that a time or two myself. Now, you can also just export the timeline using Export > Quicktime Movie… then make sure that your Settings are set to Uncompressed 8-bit NTSC 48k. It works great!

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Nick Ryan]

Hey! This worked pretty well! Thanks.