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Horizontal lines in ProRes to DVD (not field related?)
So in the eternal struggle of taking HD, making a DVD, and making it look not like crap, I’ve hit a wall.
I’ve got about a ten minute video made up almost entirely of multiple Motion sequences of 2D graphics. The project is rendered in ProRes 422 with Field Dominance set to Upper (leaving it at none made all the motion projects look blurry, but changing to upper made them nice and pretty). The motion files themselves are some rendered to ProRes first, but most were imported directly into the timeline. Most were set to render with Motion Blur and Best Quality.
I exported a Quicktime file from my Final Cut sequence and it looked gorgeous. I went to Compressor, selected DVD Best Quality, turned Frame Controls on, Resize Filter to Best, Output fields to Progressive, and De interlace to Better. I also set the Field Dominance to Top First.
Upon rendering to DVD, there’s faint horizontal lines/banding that is visible in any solid patch of color (including white). The text itself is pretty clear, so I don’t think it’s a field issue, but I’m fairly new at this so it could be! (This is occurring in the actual m2v file, but also appears when viewing a burned DVD).
I also Compressed to a variety of Quicktime/iPhone/Apple TV formats – everything looked great. So it’s just happening in the DVD export.
I’m including 4 screen shots – two from the DVD export and two from a Quicktime export at about DVD resolution, showing what it should look like. I’m not sure if it’s a Compressor or Final Cut issue, but am at whit’s end trying to figure it out!
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3 Replies
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Try a CBR setting at about 7 Mbps and then don’t deinterlace it unless it’s to be played only on computer screens. You’re just throwing out a whole field of information doing that. And VBR’s are only useful for programs that are longer than a hour long and need to fit on a single sided DVD.
Only way you can see things really properly from FCP is to look at it externally on a video monitor too. You can see both fields though if you set the canvas to 100% size, otherwise you’re only viewing 1 field not both…
Jerry
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Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
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Wow the whole viewing Canvas at 100% just blew my mind. Always see people saying you really need an actual reference monitor, but never saw it in practice!
I’m trying your suggesting CBR settings and leaving it interlaced now. Just to make sure, leaving the footage interlaced means under Frame Controls, “Output Fields” is set to “Same as source”, correct? I will let you know how that works.
In the future, if I leave Field Dominance set to “None” for my Final Cut Sequence, and if the sequence is set to Apple ProRes 422, that would mean my sequence would already be Progressive, correct? (It’s been tricky for me to figure this out because there’s never actually a toggle in FC or Compressor that specifically says this means Progressive, and this means interlaced!)
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Leaving it interlaced did the trick and putting on a deinterlace filter – thanks so much!
Going to do a bunch of tests on this file to get the best quality, but what I should be doing to get the best quality is leave the field dominance set to none in final cut, then render it to progressive in Compressor, correct?
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