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Rendering HDV to DVD makes me sad
I’m working on a DVD project that was shot on a Canon HV20. It was shot to miniDV tape in HDV 1080i60 and was captured into Final Cut Pro 7.02 as such.
The sequence has been edited. Several Motion projects have been added to generate on-screen fonts, etc. The sequence exports out to a self-contained Quicktime movie just fine and looks quite nice.
Now the sad part.
I’m trying to get this compressed down to a 16:9 SD DVD (MPEG-2) and it looks *terrible.* I’ve read many forum posts here and elsewhere and tried many suggestions, but it seems that I’m missing something really important. The video looks blocky and the fonts are not legible at all.
Can someone align me in the right direction?
I have tried exporting out to a ProRes 422 file (as per https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/hdv_timeline_to_sd_dvd.html) and that looked a little better, but when it was compressed back to MPEG-2 it still suffered from a similar result.
I bow before you, oh masters, so that you may impart your wisdom upon me.
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2 Replies
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Your export should be ProRes 720×480 Anamorphic — same frame rate.
When you encode in Compressor, do you match the field order with the source? That tutorial is a little confusing but I do this everyday without any issues so something went wrong somewhere.
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Alright, now I’m getting somewhere. I just checked the ProRes 422 export and it looks MUCH better. The aspect ratio is a little off for some reason, but I will investigate.
There was no checkbox for anamorphic and the resolution you gave had to be specified with a custom setting as there was no choice for that in the dropdown. But the render looks much better.
Also, I rendered this in ProRes 422 HQ because the regular one had a quality listed of just “medium” and I couldn’t get that to change either.
Did I miss the anamorphic setting somewhere?
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