outputting EX! time line to play on 50″ plasma

[Anthony Dias]

Hi Greg,

I’ve been having huge problems getting my 1080 30P EX 1 footage to look good on a DVD.
I was having stair-stepping, weird aliasing and crappy quality picture.

Finally after a lot of experimentation and frustration, I found a Final Cut Pro + Compressor + DVD Studio Pro solution that I am satisfied with. Hopefully it might help you out.

I am still tweaking settings and taking notes and I’ll let you know if I come across better settings.

The clips are imported wit Sony’s XDCAM Transfer utility and drag & dropped into my FCP project bin.

In Final Cut Pro 6.0.6, the sequence settings are set as follows:

[General Tab]
Frame Size: 1920X1080 HDTV 1080i (16:9)
Pixel Aspect Ratio: Square Anamorphic (not checked)
Field Dominance: None
Editing Timebase 29.97

Quicktime Video Settings:
Compressor: Apple ProRes 422 (HQ)
Quality:100%

[Render Control]
Everything checked and 100%/Best quality
Codec: Same as Sequence Codec

After editing and whatever, the whole sequence is rendered via Sequence> Render All> Both.

Then, the sequence is exported. File> Export> Using Compressor…

Compressor Settings (Inspector)

ENCODER
[Video Format Tab] no change (NTSC, 29.97, 16:9, Progressive)

[Quality Tab]
Average Bit Rate: 7.7 Mbps
Maximum Bit Rate: 9.0 Mbps
Motion Estimation: Best

[GOP Tab]
GOP Structure: IP
GOP Size: 6
Pattern: IPPPPP

FRAME CONTROLS
Frame Controls On:
Resize Filter: Best (Statistical Prediction)
Output Fields: Same as source
Adaptive Details: On (not really)
Antialias: 0
Detail Level: 0
Rate Conversion: Best (High quality motion compensation)

At this point, the whole thing is submitted and the wait begins…

The quality is WAY better at these settings than the standard compressor setting “DVD: Best Quality 90 minutes”.

It may not allow you to fit as much into a DVD, but I think most of us on these forums aren’t making feature length movies.

peace,
-Tony