non-standard frame size MPEG-2

[Drew Grimes]

My apologies, I didn’t read the “How to get FASTEST compression help” post until after I posted the above…..

1) Computer: Power Mac 8-core (2009)
2) OS: OSX 10.6.8
3) Software: After Effects CS5
4) Source Codec: A combination of stills, video (mostly Prores), and vector graphics composited in AE
5) Destination codec: MPEG-2 Program Stream
6) Destination use: Projection in a Watchout System.

Thanks,
Drew

[Nick Breckon]

Hi Drew

This may be a bit late on for you now, but I have have this challenge in the past too for some unusual display sizes.

Way back when I used to use Cleaner XL on PC you could hack the .xml file encoding profiles directly with notepad to change the parameters to get over restrictions set by the app.

Just had a little play and it seems you can do the same with compressor (I’m on v3). So make yourself a custom profile MP2 program stream that roughly hits your spec in terms of bitrate/GOP etc, close compressor and then find the corresponding .setting file in Library>Application Support>Compressor and pop it open in textedit. You can then hunt down the frame dimensions and edit away – when you reopen compressor the changes will appear!

I may get reprimanded for this hacker approach but it does work and has produced good results for me in the past.

All the best
Nick

[Brian Lynn]

You’re not trying to produce this video to play across multiple WatchOUT outputs are you? If you are please refer to the Dataton documentation for WatchOUT and read up on “Video Proxies” and “Pre-Splitting video for playback”.