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FCP Still Photography Settings Question
Hi-
I am a professional photographer and am starting to create 16:9 video DVDs of my images. Currently I am using the latest version of Final Cut Studio. My question is, what are the absolute best settings (Final Cut, Comptressor, DVDSP) to use to create a DVD of my images. They all will use a 3 second dissolve transition. Below are my current settings. It would be awesome if I could get some feeback on my settings and what I could do better.I first start with an 853×480 RGB TIFF (I have a higher resolution available. Should I be working in 1920×1080?)
In FCP Sequence Settings:
Frame Size 720×480
Aspect Ratio: NTSC DV (3:2)
Pixel Aspect Ratio: NTSC-CCIR 601/DV 720×480
Anamorphic 16:9 checked
Field Dominance: Lower (Even)
Editing Timebase 29.97QuickTime Video Settings:
Compressor: Animation (Is this the best codec to use?)
Quality: 100%
Advanced>Compressor: Depth: Millions of Colors+I then export to Compressor
From Compressor:
Setting: DVD Best Quality 90 Minutes 16:9
File Format: MPEG-2
Video Format: NTSC
Rate: 29.97
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Field Dominance: Bottom FirstQuality>
Mode: Two Pass VBR Best
Average Bit Rate: 6.2 Mbps
Maximum Bit Rate: 7.7 Mbps
Motion Estimation: BestIn DVDSP:
SD DVD
Preferences > Encoding (Are these effective since I encode in Compressor???)
Field Order: Auto
Mode: Two Pass VBR
Bit Rate: 5.5 Mbps
Max Bit Rate: 7.2 Mbps
Motion Estimation: Best -
3 Replies
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Read the manual (or help file) in DVD Studio Pro about creating slide shows.
Right now you’re doing an entire extra step by using Final Cut to make a video. Not only will making a slideshow in DVD StudioPro remove the Final Cut use out of your workflow but the DVD itself will know that each photo is a seperate thing. This means you’ll be able to use the “next chapter” button on a remote to go to the next photo (or back, too).
By making a video it’s just one long video file. Unless you spend the time to manually put a chapter maker on each photo you won’t have that feature. Plus, at the moment you’re subjecting your photos to DV compression and THEN the MPEG II compression. By going with the slideshow method I believe the photos will be directly encoded into the right format without having the DV compression put in the middle.
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I am having extreme quality problems when creating the slideshow directly in DVDSP. The transitions aren’t as nice, and once the transition is over the image has a really weird pixel shift and isn’t smooth, which results in a poor image. Working in FCP fixed that problem. I am testing with both a Panasonic and Phillips DVD player on a 50″ LG Plasma. Maybe I have setting wrong in DVDSP??? Thanks for the help.
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Check the prefrences in DVD Studio Pro. There is an “Encoding” tab. Try setting it to a CBR of 7.0 and see what you get. Be sure to encode your audio as an AC3 using Compressor and not a PCM or AIFF. That will give you ample bandwidth for the higher video rate.
I don’t know how many photos you’re using but I’m hopefull that even a high setting like that will still fit on a single DVD.
Let us know if it doesn’t or if the quality still isn’t what you’d like. If not, I’d suggest setting up some kind of timeline in Final Cut that’s not DV. Probably some kind of HD timeline. That will give you the most amount of pixels to work with in the video. When you compress that it will still go down to an anamorphich 720×480 file, but at least you avoid the DV compression.
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