Retaining Compression and Edit Markers in Compressor

[Brad Wright]

I really can’t tell what you are seeing, so I’m guessing. What you could be seeing is interlaced video lines which are jagged edges around anything that is moving in the video. These interlaced lines don’t appear on your television, but without them your video doesn’t retain the smooth motion that it originally had. Shoot me an email at support@dvdxdv.com. I’d love to take a look at it and further help you.

Brad Wright is software engineer, so it may be difficult to understand what he is saying. He is always happy to explain his greater detail.

[Brad Elliott]

I realize your question involves keeping marker info but you may want to consider another approach.

I have had the most success with getting HD to SD DVDs with the following:

1) Make a SD version of your final HD seq. in FC(I have had limited success with Compressor doing the down convert for SD DVD from HD.)
2) Add markers as needed and then you will only need to be making DVD files from the FC SD QT which will keep the marker info.

1st pass I do not change the frame controls in the presets.

You may want to do some short tests with the current problem areas to see if it helps to have compression markers or not. They have have helped me in some instances but I do use them until after I have tried the above and am still finding problems.

[Melissa Goldman]

Thanks for that idea and for responding.

I tried basically that same thing yesterday, but I was wasting hours dealing with problem title cards and other nitpicky things that did not like being moved from an HD sequence to an SD sequence. But it did give me an idea. This is my current plan, in case anybody cares about an update. And please tell me if this sounds like it’ll give me problems!

I tried shrinking the timeline in After Effects, which, while pretty slow, did look great. So I’m going to to create an SD quicktime from After Effects and then swap that back into my Final Cut timeline (which already has the compression and chapter markers inserted. Then I’ll export to Quicktime using Current Settings with DVDSPro Markers (which I think (?) should just pass the video through rather than recompressing). Why didn’t I think of this before??

By the way, the reason I’m worried about the compression markers is because there were some motion artifacts in the previous version of the DVD that I made. Because of some specific quirks about my project and workflow, I have reason to think that compression markers will be helpful all around.

THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR HELP! I really appreciate it.