loss of quality from final cut

[Charles Simonson]

You lose quality because you are compressing the images and frames from the source. As is the case with all forms of compression, it never looks exactly as good as the source. Compressor 2 does have a good MPEG-2 encoder if all you need to do is go from the source codec to MPEG-2. If you need to scale, deinterlace, or adjust color however, Compressor’s shortcomings can easily be seen. One solution if you need to apply some preprocessing to your source before the actual encoding is to use Popwire Compression Master 3. CM3 has the best of breed preprocessing filters in a software package under $1000 on the market today. You can do the preprocessing with CM to an uncompressed codec, and then use that as the source for Compressor. Or you can just use the MPEG-2 encoder included with CM, as it too is quite good.

[Alexander Gao]

just a question: Why would compressor have trouble with things like color correction, etc. if the above poster exported to quicktime BEFORE going to compressor?

Alexander Gao

“When the revolution happens, I’ll be leading it.”

[Charles Simonson]

Because just exporting to QT beforehand (assuming they do an export to QuickTime and not an export using QuickTime conversion) is only going to net a movie that has the same color format as the source. DV is 4:1:1 so Compressor needs to convert that color space to 4:2:0 for MPEG-2 encoding. The same goes if the source is 5:1:1, 4:4:4, 3:1:1, or RGB. If you use Compression Master to convert from DV 4:1:1 to BlackMagic 8bit 4:2:2 and then to MPEG-2 4:2:0 (with either CM or Compressor), the resulting MPEG-2 will generally have better and more accurate color than just going directly from DV 4:1:1 to MPEG-2 4:2:0 with Compressor only. QT (the base core of Compressor) does not do a good job with color conversion and the image processing filters in Compressor are in general very weak.

-CS

“I hate your signature.”

[Charles Simonson]

BTW, I think their issues were less to do with poor color and more to do with poor overall quality in the final encode. If they were trying to deinterlace and scale with Compressor, that would likely cause more problems than color space conversions.

[Wiggy1]

Thanks man. Very helpful!

kernow

[Wiggy1]

We do export using quicktime conversion, best quality 24 frames rather than just export to quicktime

kernow

[Charles Simonson]

I would actually suggest you not do that and just export to QT without the conversion.