having issue with Compressor to MPEG2 video

[Daniel Low]

[Jason Brown] “I’m doing a bit-rate as variable 7mbps…with a limit of 7.8…I’ve played with several settings and tweaked them”

There are a lot more setting we’d need to know about before being able to track down the problem you are having. There is no reason why Squeeze or episode should look significantly better than compressor.

Have you tried using one of the Apple supplied presets and not messing with it?

You might want to try switching to CBR @ 7Mb/s as well. VBR works best where there’s much more of a variable between average and max, in your case you might see a much better transcode is you went for an average of 3.5Mb/s and a limit 7.8Mb/s

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[Jason Brown]

I started with the apple compressor settings. When that wasn’t working…I started tweaking. I’ve done CBR, VBR…I’ve probably done 15 different tests…and they all aren’t as clear as what I’m pushing out of Sorenson or Episode.

I have a fair knowledge…I’ve been authoring/encoding for about 5-6 years, so I’m not a noob to this. I’ve only been using Compressor for the last couple months and can’t figure out what’s going on.

-Jason

[Daniel Low]

[Jason Brown] “I have a fair knowledge…I’ve been authoring/encoding for about 5-6 years, so I’m not a noob to this”

Then you should know that when targeting VBR, your peak rate should be set to be roughly double your average rate.

Can you post comparison screen grabs of the output from each application?

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[Jason Brown]

[Daniel Low] “Then you should know that when targeting VBR, your peak rate should be set to be roughly double your average rate. “

I guess you can always learn something new…I didn’t say I was an expert, just “not a newbie” lol 🙂

I’ll do some screengrabs tonight and show you an example.

-jason

[Jason Brown]

OK…as I did some further testing and was reading posts online. I think I figured this out. I have a better question to ask. And I realized that I know MUCH less about this than I thought I did. I’ve only been working in HD since I came from an SD AVID media composer to Final Cut…about 6 months ago.

My source footage is HDV – upper field first.

As I was looking through episode…there is a setting – HD to SD DVD…in that setting, there is a filter to reverse the field order (UFF to BFF) that is applied.

So I setup compressor to use the episode plug-in. And compressed…the results: (screengrab from VLC)

https://www.jbtwist.com/CC/Compressor.png
https://www.jbtwist.com/CC/Episode.png
https://www.jbtwist.com/CC/Compressor_BFF.png

(I included the last file as a compressor job where I changed field dominance to Upper comparable to the Episode)

Now, I know I’m looking at interlaced footage on computer…and there are SEVERAL other factors. But I think this has to do with interlacing. The episode version looks much better. Edges are cleaner and it IS interlaced (and darker for some reason…)

So my new question…I thought SD-DVD could contain either field order, UFF or BFF as long as the MPEG2 file had the correct header for the DVD player to read…

Thanks for your help…I really appreciate it!

-jason

[Daniel Low]

I’m not sure about that Episode preset but when going from interlaced HD to SD you deinterlace in 99.99999% of cases and deliver a progressive SD output.

Interlaced PAL is nearly always UFF.

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Sent from my iPad Nano.