Exporting 100% Best Quality

[Russell Lasson]

If you export it as a QuickTime Movie – Current Setting (not QuickTime Conversion) then you will have exactly what you have in your timeline. It just copies data.

I’m trying to decide if I really want to tell you about the “Best Possible Quailty” workflow. It’s quite a bit of explaining.

-Russ

[Russell Lasson]

Maybe the easiest thing for you do to is:

1. Duplicate your sequence and add “10-bit” to the name
2. Open your duplicated sequence and select Sequence – Settings
3. Change the Compressor to “Uncompressed 10-bit”
4. Select the Video Processing tab
5. Change to Render all YUV material in high-precision YUV
6. Change Motion Filtering Quality to Best

Now everything on your timeline says it needs to be rendered. You don’t need to render it. You now need to export your MPEG-2 file for you DVD using the 10-bit sequence using Compressor. You can then take that into DVDSP.

NOTE: If you brought in other graphics, titles, effects, etc from another program like After Effects or Motion, it would be better to re-render those out of those application in 10-bit uncompressed and replace the ones that came from your DV timeline.

This is about as simple as I can make it without going into a full online edit.

-Russ

[Shane Ross]

Russell…why do this? Taking ANY footage and putting it into an uncompressed 10-bit timeline will compress it. It will not look any better than if you exported it as a full quality QT movie using the sequence settings. In fact, it will compress the footage even more…so this isn’t the way to go.

I only suggest doing this if you are working in a DV timelne and have a lot of graphics and titles that you want to look good…and I only suggest going to DV50 or Photo JPEG at 75%… at most uncompressed 8-bit. As they will do better in an uncompressed timeline than a DV timeline. Doing this with just DV footage gets you nothing but large file sizes.

And not rendering it? Why not? When exporting this to Compressor FCP will render it, THEN compress the file. And typically this will make the export take much longer. Best to render, then export. In my experience.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Russell Lasson]

Putting DV footage in a 10-bit uncompressed timeline does not compress the footage. It translates the current values of the DV footage into an uncompressed information, hence not compressing it. A capture card does the same thing if you digitize in from DV to an Uncompressed file. Now it won’t improve your original footage, but any thing that is done to that footage will improve (graphics, titles, color correction, transitions, etc.)

[Shane Ross] “I only suggest doing this if you are working in a DV timelne and have a lot of graphics and titles that you want to look good…and I only suggest going to DV50 or Photo JPEG at 75%… at most uncompressed 8-bit. As they will do better in an uncompressed timeline than a DV timeline. Doing this with just DV footage gets you nothing but large file sizes.”

Isn’t that basicly what I told jujuelliot to do? But go to 10-bit. All of the codecs you listed are only 8-bit (256 colors per channel). 10-bit can have 1024 colors per channel.

Finally, you don’t need to render out all of your footage to a file! Compressor is smart enought to do the calculation without having to build the file first and waste space on your hard drive.

Now, jujuelliot asked for the “best quality possible.” Will this process take a long time? OF COURSE! But when you start talking about “best quality possible” you stop talking about fastest possible option.

-Russ

[Shane Ross]

[Russell Lasson] “Putting DV footage in a 10-bit uncompressed timeline does not compress the footage. It translates the current values of the DV footage into an uncompressed information, hence not compressing it.”

Any capture not done via firewire to the native codec is compressing the footage. Going to 10-bit uncompressed will look better than most others, but it is still adding compression to the footage. 10-bit uncompressed compression. UC is still compressed.

[Russell Lasson] “Now it won’t improve your original footage, but any thing that is done to that footage will improve (graphics, titles, color correction, transitions, etc.)”

This is where we are in agreement. Only do this if you are going to have a lot of graphics and want them clean, or if you want the benefit of smooth color correction. Still, DV is an 8-bit codec, and going 10-bit might be overkill for 90% of the people out there. That is why I suggest DV50 or 8-bit UC. And I ONLY suggest doing this if you want the better titles and graphics otherwise, going from DV to UC is a waste of space. But, it depends on your final delivery and how much time you want to spend on it and how good you want your color correction to be.

[Russell Lasson] “Finally, you don’t need to render out all of your footage to a file! Compressor is smart enought to do the calculation without having to build the file first and waste space on your hard drive.”

Not in my experience. When I tried this without rendering, Compressor took 22 hours for a 90 min show. When I took 2 hours to render it, Compressor only needed 9 hours to make a DVD file. An 11 hour savings.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Russell Lasson]

[Shane Ross] “[Russell Lasson] “Finally, you don’t need to render out all of your footage to a file! Compressor is smart enought to do the calculation without having to build the file first and waste space on your hard drive.”

Not in my experience. When I tried this without rendering, Compressor took 22 hours for a 90 min show. When I took 2 hours to render it, Compressor only needed 9 hours to make a DVD file. An 11 hour savings.”

But you had to render the file to disc which took up space. So whichever metheod people want to use. I use both depending on the situation.

And it was my understanding that uncompressed is uncompressed, not compressed. I’d like to learn more about it if I’m wrong. Do you have any info that you would suggest?

-Russ

[Russell Lasson]

In the FCP manual it says:

Uncompressed
This isn

[Shane Ross]

[Russell Lasson] “This isn

[Alan Okey]

Just an academic observation: the Uncompressed codec will also turn any 4:4:4 RGB graphics into 4:2:2 YUV footage, so to be precise, the Uncompressed codec does throw out half of the color resolution when compared with original 4:4:4 RGB files.

[_adam_]

Compressor doesn’t use FCP’s render files. It goes straight to the media referenced in the timeline itself and builds from there. Along with the obvious time-saving benefit, you also don’t have to worry about a bad render making it into your newly compressed file.