Problem downconverting HD to SD

[Bret Williams]

Yesh.

[William Carr]

Yes! Your clean smooth export dropped into Compressor, with the setting “DVD Best Quality 90 Minutes” applied, will give you a fine DVD.

FWIW I always export from a completed rendered FCP sequence a current settings movie of every project, and that is the file that then continues its journey into a world of conversions and formats. It’s nice to have a holistic and integral final movie file of a project, all spiffy and shiny and archived away somewhere for posterity. Exporting AND converting directly from a sequence within FCP can bring about other issues.

[David Roth weiss]

[William Carr] “FWIW I always export from a completed rendered FCP sequence a current settings movie of every project, and that is the file that then continues its journey into a world of conversions and formats. It’s nice to have a holistic and integral final movie file of a project, all spiffy and shiny and archived away somewhere for posterity.”

Absolutely! Consider the files created using Export to Quicktime Movie as your master, and all files made from that files as sub-masters. It’s not very different from the old days when we actually mastered to tape.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

Don’t miss my new Creative Cow Podcast: Producing Episodic TV with “24” Producer Michael Klick:
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/Podcast-Series-1_Michael-Klick/1

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.

[Laura Weinstein]

Thanks everyone! I’ll do that. I guess I just thought for some reason it would somehow take away quality to export and then compress from the export. But sounds like it doesn’t!

[Michael Gissing]

If you export with current settings there is no recompression unless you select the option to recompress frames.

[Steve Eisen]

[Laura Weinstein] “So then I’ll import my full res version into compressor and use the setting mpeg 2 best for 90 minutes? Is that really the best option? My project is only about 25”

Or CBR at 7.0. A little bit faster than 2-pass VBR.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Bret Williams]

I’m willing to bet that AEs downscaling of HD to SD is so superior to compressor’s that any minute difference from an additional compression step is imperceptible. If you were really worried about extra compression steps you’d export straight to compressor where your entire timeline is rendered from the sources directly to mpeg2, completely skipping any intermediate prores (or other) codec.