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Best-Quality Export to DVD and miniDV Tape
I’m finishing a 10-minute congratulations video for an association’s awards dinner. It’s a DV-NTSC project, edited on FCP 6. It’s got original DV footage we shot, b-rollish dv stuff we were given; pretty high quality photos; and some material we ripped from a non-commercial DVD using MPEG Streamclip. It’s got two Livetype titles, plus a few lower thirds, done with the text generator in FCP. It’s got a bunch of transitions, mainly simple dissolves. It has two or three effects, and some minor motion stuff – pushing in on photos, making photos move across the screen. All in all it’s a pretty simple project. The only weirdness with the audio is that I’ve used some mp3 files and rendered them so they’re playable. If necessary, I could easily convert them to AIFF in iTunes and reimport them.
I am told that the client wants a DVD and a miniDV tape of the video. I guess he hasn’t decided how he’s going to play it. He says he’s going to display it on a rear projection TV screen, whatever that exactly means. That’s all he’s been willing to tell me, so that’s all I know.
Yesterday, my producer watched the DVD I made by exporting my sequence to Quicktime (all default settings) (NOT QuickTime Conversion) and burning the QT file to a DVD using Toast Platinum. She said there was a lot of shakiness/stuttering in the video when she played it in a DVD player connected to a TV. I saw none of this in FCP. She said the audio levels were all over the place (but the mix was OK when I played it in FCP).
Here’s the question: Knowing what you know (which is what I know), what is the best way (i.e., with the highest quality) to export my sequence to DVD and miniDV tape? With the fewest video and audio glitches, best handling of transitions, titles and effects, etc.?
Thanks for any advice.
Giraut
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4 Replies
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First suggestion: monitor your work with a broadcast monitor, or at least a TV set so you can at least see all the “shakiness”. This is most likely from not deinterlacing some of your stills/freeze frames (use the Deinterlace filter to remedy this). You didn’t see this problem in FCP because you are not seeing the interlaced image on the computer monitor. One of the biggest improvements you can make to your workflow is to monitor your work as you work, and not after. You certainly don’t want a client seeing these mistakes. Proper monitoring will help you avoid this in the future.
You can improve your rendered images by changing the sequence settings to ProRes and then re-rendering before exporting for your MPEG 2 files.
Kevin Monahan
http://www.fcpworld.com
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro -
Hi Paul,
For laying on to tape, will you be passing the signal through a video card and into a deck, or just over Firewire?
The best practice is to set your sequence settings to Apple Pro Res and ‘render to high precision YUV’, render, then Edit to Tape. As I’m sure you know, Mini DV is very much a compressed tape format, but rendering to Pro Res at least doesn’t add further [noticeable] compression to things like graphics, the photos etc.
For the DVD, export Quicktime Movie from FCP using the settings as above. Then bring that file into Compressor and drop the ‘DVD Best Quality’ template settings onto your file. This generally yields sufficient results, although if you’re in a position to run some tests you can play with the settings on ten second segments and see what looks best.
The final stage is to bring those files into DVD Studio Pro, create any menus you want, then burn the DVD. If you’ve not done this before it’s relatively straight-forward, but check the DVD Studio forum for tips.
It might be worth mentioning to your client, though, that the best quality will come from playing it as a file from a harddrive – is this an option?
Good luck,
Alex Elkins -
Just finished 2 hour movie, need to create a QT for client and composer, then need to burn to DVD, do the same parameters work in PAL as you have laid out for NTSC?
My Sequence is HD(1440×180) (16:9)
Compressor set to XDCam 1080p25(3MbsVBR)
Field dominance none.Do I simply create a QT Movie as per sequence settings and then burn a DVD as per your instructions?
Richard Clark’s kiwicafe.com
Film Editor & . . .
https://kiwicafe.blogspot.com/
NZ & US & . . . -
Hi Richard,
I would suggest changing your sequence compression in FCP to Apple Pro Res 422, and set it to render as High Precision YUV, as suggested above. Rendering as XDCam will add unwanted compression to everything, whereas Pro Res will ensure that the quality remains the best it can be.
Once the sequence is rendered, export a Quicktime Movie using ‘Current Settings’, then bring that file into Compressor to do the conversion to DVD. The DVD Best Settings template is pretty good. As you’ll be downconverting to SD, you might also want to try turning Frame Controls on in the video settings window, and set the Resize Filter to either ‘Better’ or ‘Best’ (depending on how long you’re prepared to wait for it). Run some tests on ten second segments to see what works best.
All of the other settings like deinterlace, rate conversion etc can remain as they are.I’d also suggest you look into setting up multiple core rendering using QMaster if you’ve not already done so – this page looks like a good run-through of how to do it, although I’ve not read the entire thing. There’s plenty of information on the net and here on the Cow anyway, but let me know if you get stuck.
All the best,
Alex Elkins
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