Strange Compressor Issue

Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

Strange Compressor Issue

Posted by Jeremy Brunson on May 6, 2008 at 10:18 pm

Hello,

I’ve been having some issues lately exporting MPEG2 with Compressor.

1) In Final Cut, my sequence is setup with Apple ProRes 422 (HQ). Our frame size is 640×480 with an aspect ratio of NTSC (4:3) and a pixel aspect ratio of Square. My editing timebase is 23.98.

2) I export a Quicktime Reference Movie and then take it into Compressor. I encode it with the standard MPEG-2 6.2Mbps 2-pass standard setting.

3) I put it all together in DVD Studio Pro.

4) I play it in a DVD player hooked up to a 720P Panasonic Plasma TV with a Toshiba upconverting DVD player. I turn the upconversion off so it plays at 480P.

Material that go through the process this way looks very jagged. It looks really bad. When I change the compressor in my sequence in FCP from Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) to DV/DVPRO – NTSC the end result looks pretty good. The jagged edges are no longer an issue.

Is there something that I’m doing wrong? I also tried changing my sequence settings to Compressor: Uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2 and also experienced the jaggies. Any insight would be a great help. I don’t want to lose extra (and time) by converting everything that I have from ProRes to DV/DVCPRO. It seems pointless and unnecessary.

A little further background: All our stuff is shot in DVCPRO HD 720P 23.98. Our target is the web and we then create a 4:3 version with the frame size of 640×480. Also we’re running Final Cut 6.03 on a Mac Pro Quad Core 3 Ghz with 5 GB Ram running OSX 10.4.11.

Thanks,
Jeremy

Jeremy Brunson replied 18 years ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Rafael Amador
May 7, 2008 at 3:04 am

Hi Jeremy,
Are you sure that Proress supports 640×480?

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Walter Biscardi
May 7, 2008 at 3:25 am

[Jeremy Brunson] “1) In Final Cut, my sequence is setup with Apple ProRes 422 (HQ). Our frame size is 640×480 with an aspect ratio of NTSC (4:3) and a pixel aspect ratio of Square. My editing timebase is 23.98.”

640×480 is a multi-media size. Why are you working in that frame size? 720×480 is a more standard video frame size.

[Jeremy Brunson] “Is there something that I’m doing wrong?”

I think it’s the odd frame size. What is your original footage?

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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Jeremy Brunson
May 7, 2008 at 4:36 pm

Thanks. I did a test with standard frame sizes (720×480) with Apple ProRes 422 (HQ). It looked fantastic. Where I’m working, they make video for the web. Everything was setup quickly and we’ve been using the same settings ever since. Since we were going straight to the web, we never noticed any issues. We’ve recently had to put some stuff on DVD and further examined our process.

We shoot on Panasonic HVX 200 cameras. We shoot at 23.98 DVCPro HD 720P. We edit it native and then we nest it in a 640×480 sequence. We then put titles and a bug in the “matte” area. We had just been copying that sequence into new projects and changing text, etc. Whoever set it up that way over a year ago isn’t here anymore.

Thanks for the tip. We’re going to look at everything else in our workflow and make sure it’s being done in a logical way.

Best,
Jeremy

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