H.264 for DVD Studio Pro, incompatible format?? thoughts on this?

[Michael Sacci]

Lower the Max Bitrate to something like 8.5 or lower and it should import.

[Dennis Noel gomez]

Michael,

Thanks for the reply, lowering the max bitrate doesn’t help. From compressor, using the HD DVD H.264 setting, the resulting H.264 file can’t be imported into DVD Studio Pro.
I’m honestly not so sure what to do anymore, I followed the tutorial on this:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/hd_dvds_on_sd_dvds_young.html
link, but still didn’t work.

Do you have any other suggestions?
I need my final output to be HD DVD, not SD DVD, but I’m using DVD-R.

Cheers

Dennis Noel Gomez
In house video Editor
FourLeafFilms

[Per Stålka]

Apple DVD Studio Pro doesn’t support interlaced formats (1080i) encoded in H.264.

Source: https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301463

[Dennis Noel gomez]

Well the thing is I’m not using progressive footage, all my footage is interlaced and my exported files are also set as interlaced.

The H.264 still isn’t importing into DVD Studio Pro.

It’s really weird, I don’t know why.
I just resorted to using the .MPEG format for HD DVD output.

I’d still like to find out how you use the H.264 for DVD SP, if you have any other suggestions I’m all ears.

Thanks again,
Dennis

Dennis Noel Gomez
In house video Editor
FourLeafFilms

[Per Stålka]

You could try to use Compressor to convert the file to 720p H.264. That should go into DVD Studio Pro.

As a matter of fact I tried such a conversion myself, though I wasn’t completely satisfied with the output. It wasn’t that bad, but I was hoping for more. The colors were not right, and with jerky movements in some scenes. Though I still believe, that you could achieve a better results by tuning some of the settings in Compressor, which I haven’t had the time to try yet.

So I someone have a recipe for Compressor conversion from 1080i to 720p I would love to hear.

[Ken Moscaritolo]

I know this is an old topic but if it helps someone, you must set DVDSP to HD DVD in the preferences menu. For an SD disc, HD anything is incompatible. 1080 to 720 via FCP is easiest.

[Jim Rizor]

It sucks that HD format is so predominant on compressor and and DVD Studio Pro even though the format is dead. I shot on an SR-12 and have a nice picture in the camera, but am having a hell of a time bringing high res to the DVD burn from my edited timeline. I can make a beautiful HD DVD but what good is that now? I’m doing a M-peg4 conversion right now and moved the res to 1920X1080 and hope that DVD Studio will keep the high resolution without going back to the lame 720…

[Michael Sacci]

You are going down the wrong path here. There is no good reason for you to do to H264 (or any Mpeg4) and every reason not to. DVD is SD and converting it to another highly compressed codec is just a waste of time as well as a way to lose even more quality. SD DVD is always 720×480 (in NTSCland) every hollywood DVD is that resolution, no way around that, not a DVDSP problem.

HD DVD being a dead format has no barring on SD DVD. If you want to stay in HD you need to produce a BluRay Disc, which requires different software.

[Luke Moodley]

This is an old post but this may help. I’ve shot some footage in 1080i HDV, brought into FCP and export out with current settings. I’ve then used compressor to send to H.264 6.75Mbps under HD DVD: H.264 90 minutes and got a fairly good quality results (approx. 60MB per minute of footage)

This format is incompatible with DVD Studio Pro but you’ll find you can import this into iDVD ’09 and produce a SD DVD which you’ll be able to play on pretty much anything with a reasonably quality. Problem is you stuck with using iDVD for your menus etc, which I appreciate is not ideal.