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Compressor worse than iDVD with stills and titles?
Can someone help me understand what’s happening? I make DVDs for clients from FCP by exporting a ProRes QT, dropping that in Compressor, choosing Best MPEG2 settings, and then importing the resulting m2v and aiff files into DVDSP to build the DVD, finally burning the TS folders in Toast. Always been happy with the results. Now I have a client who happened to make their own DVD of a rough cut using iDVD. ANd now they are telling me the titles and stills look “much better” on their DVD (from iDVD). This was rather embarassing, but sure enough when I compared the two, in the DVDSP/Compressor version there are clear jagged edges in my titles and the stills have noticeable blockiness too them, like suddenly they aren’t of sufficient resolution.
Now granted this was being checked out using the DVD Player at full screen on an iMac. And I immediately said this was causing the blockiness – watching an SD DVD scaled up to full screen (24″ iMac). But, played back in the same way, the iDVD disc displayed really clean titles and the stills were block free.
Can anybody explain to me why this would be so? So that I can explain it to my client, who’s now feeling even more emboldened to second guess my workflow… or should I just switch to making DVDs with iDVD? The source video, fwiw, is HDV and the ProRes QT is HD as well, but non HQ.
many thanks
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4 Replies
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I’m guessing you are not using compressors ‘frame controls’ to perform the scaling and deinterlacing.
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“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”Steve Ballmer To USA Today
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Thanks for the reply, Daniel. You’ve guessed correct. I’ve always just let Compressor do it’s thing based on the preset DVD settings…
How do you recommend using the frame controls to do the scaling and deinterlacing… (although isn’t the DVD standard interlaced? If you’re not purposely making a 24p DVD?)-Tom
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[Thomas Piper] “(although isn’t the DVD standard interlaced?”
Yes and no. The problem for you is that you are going from HDV to SD and as such you need to deinterlace your footage.
There’s a chapter about Frame controls in the compressor manual and if you search this forum there plenty that has been posted about them.
One question
Why do you use Toast to burn your DVDs?
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“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”Steve Ballmer To USA Today
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Thanks again, Daniel. I did do some reading through all the cow posts that I could find and I think I’ve got a much better handle on how and why they work. For instance, I understand now that when resizing from HD to SD there is necessarily deinterlacing involved. One poster even suggested doing a discreet turn in Compressor for each step (deinterlacing, then resizing). Don’t know if that’s overkill or not… I just used frame controls in one compression (from ProRes QT direct to MPEG2) this time. I’ll check the results around lunchtime. I also tried going from ProRes QT to SD 8bit Uncompressed and then from the SD 8bit mov to MPEG2. That actually looked pretty good. But I’ll compare with the frame controls version today (I suppose I could’ve/should’ve used frame controls for the ProRes to SD Uncompressed resizing…)
As for Toast, it’s just a holdover from way back when Build & Burn in the first DVDSP was less than reliable for playback (back when burned DVDs and DVD players didn’t all get along so well) – habit is all…
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