To many effects?

[Todd Reid]

your pixellation is not coming from too many effect, its coming from your highly compressed format, DV.
If your working in FCP6, then motion comes with it in Final Cut Studio 2. You should have complete access to Motion.

Try changing your sequence codec to something that has less compression (DV50 is the next step, try uncompressed if your computer can handle it), that is going to be about the best you can do. No footage will ever be higher quality than its original format. You can do a few “workarounds”, but technically dv footage ingested, will quite often show compression or “jaggies” as some call them, especially around the color red.

Working in a higher quality sequence codec, will at the very least, help minimize your pixellation.
For the most part, the amount of effects you add to a clip shouldn’t have much to do with the final output pixellating, unless you are dealing with specific effects to achieve that look, which there are some.

Also keep in mind, that not only are you capturing on a highly compressed format, you are introducing more compression when you export to mpg for your dvd.

[Stephan Hill]

Thank you for the reply. Could I ask a side question?

Is it correct that there is no advantage to import DV-NTSC footage into FCP other then a standard Apple Fire wire connection? I have always worked with DV video and believed from this forum that once the compressed video in the DV format is placed on the tape you can’t really “Res-up” through a better important. Is that correct?

The funny thing is that when I play the video directly from my Panasonic DVX100 to a video projector (using a RCA connection which I realize is very low) the image is GREAT! It looks like HD I have seen. But once I capture, edit and place to DVD it becomes blurry, pixilated. How do you retain that quality from that camera?

[Todd Reid]

you are correct. Some form of compression occurs just to get in on the tape. So, in theory, a capture card wouldn’t help much.
What it can do is give you more digital information to do complex things like chroma key or color correction. Its not an exact science, but if you “up converted” DV footage to even 720p, your still not “gaining” quality, but you possibly gain more depth in the 1’s and 0’s to manipulate the footage further (or better) than if you just plugged a firewire cable into your computer.

I hear you about it looking good on the tape. If I’m not mistaken, FCP doesn’t add its compressions until it needs to render the timeline (which could be when you output).

I’ve had footage where people are wearing red clothing, and it looked great until I added a non-realtime effect like color correction, then from that point on, I saw jaggies, even on the raw clip viewed straight from the computer.

Again, I mention that in your workflow that you’ve mentioned, there is at least 2 places where you are introducing more compression after the camera……importing and exporting (in this situation) is adding more compression.

The fact is that uncompressed video files are extremely large, so compression codecs were created so that we could even work with them on computers. I’m still amazed that my desktop computer can do more than the 2 rooms FULL of processing and production equipment that was the first linear edit suite I learned on. We’ve come a very long way in the past 15-20 years, but not far enough that you can plug in a small cable and expect pristine quality video.

Try working in a higher quality/lower compression sequence and see if that helps.

Also, where are you viewing your dvd? (computer/flatscreen tv/older CRT)?

[Stephan Hill]

Thank you again Todd for your patience.

Interesting, question about viewing. I have tried two experiments.

1) Was to create a DVD as a disk image and play it off of my laptop to the projector via a VGA cable. The result was terrible. I assume first because of compression in the DVD codec but mainly due to the pixel aspect ratio of square vs. rectangle. When I view a DV-NTSC QuickTime by itself in QT Player it always looks bad for this reason. That correct isn’t it?
2) I burned a real DVD via DVDSP and compressed via Compressor. I viewed through a progressive scan DVD player with component cables to an Epson Powerlite 62c projector.

So I am going to try to capture in DV50 and edit a Sequence with an Apple ProRes 422 Compressor setting. How does that sound?

[Todd Reid]

you didn’t mention, how did experiment #2 look? I would assume at least a bit better.

Your new flow sounds good, the only thing you might run into, is that if your footage isn’t DV50 (which you say it isn’t), FCP may not allow you to capture it, it may abort and/or drop frames via firewire.
Give it a shot, if you have trouble, you may be stuck with DV as far as digitizing. You will be able to change your sequences for sure with little trouble.

If Pro Res doesn’t give you the desired improvements, try a couple other ones, (like DV50 or uncompressed 8 bit).

I have heard of settings tweaks within compressor that can give better results than the presets. I don’t know them off the top of my head. Try searching the DVDSP forum. This will lessen the impact of the second layer of compression you are adding.

just curious.
How beefy is your computer? Do you have a raid? eSata? or are you using internal storage?

[Randy Lee]

Does it look ok if you just export a self-contained quicktime out of Final Cut? Export > Quicktime Movie, NOT quicktime conversion. If it does, do you really have any reason to go to Mpeg 2 to be able to play it through the VGA cable? As a mac person, I feel horrible saying this, but I’ve never done that with a mac, only with a PC, and on a pc you don’t need to use an mpeg 2, you can play WMV’s or QT’s just fine through VGA. If you could play the quicktime, that would save you an important level of compression.

Also, what settings are you using for your Mpeg 2? If your video is under 90 minutes, try a 7.0 mb/s CBR with motion estimate > Best and see how it looks. The settings you use in compressor can make a huge difference in your final DVD.

Are you using the correct easy setup when you bring in your footage? (Did you have to render when initially putting footage in the timeline?)

If you have the time, try duplicating your final sequence, then opening up the new one, hitting cmd-0, and changing the compressor settings to DV50, then rendering the entire sequence. If you don’t have to render a clip after changing timeline settings, Final Cut won’t render it into the new codec. You can force everything to render by selecting your timeline, hitting cmd-a, then doing something that doesn’t conflict with filters you’ve used and that is easily undone, such as modify > composite mode > pick one, then immediately going back to modify > composite mode > normal. (Or anything similar, don’t do this if you’re using composite modes unless you want to re-do them). Render, and everything will be in DV50. Export a quicktime of that and see how it looks.

Thats all I have time for at the moment, there are more things that could be tried, but I need to get back to work. DV is DV. Its never as good as better shooting formats. But we can try to keep it as workable as it gets.

Best of luck to you.

[Stephan Hill]

Thanks for the post! I am going to try your suggestion. Here is the strange thing however. Any digital video file that I have on the computer looks choppy or pixilated. I capture either direct from the camera (Panasonic DVX100) or a deck (JVC –SR-VS20) with Final Cut Pro 6.0. I then open up the video file directly as a stand-alone QT file and it looks pixilated. It looks great in FCP but at 50% in the Canvas window.

I am racking my brains to figure out what is different in my workflow. I have been working with video and FC for years. I updated to FCP 6 and QT 7 a month ago. Are their any known issues?

It is clear that it is not the camera. The image looks great their but once it is captured it looks bad.

I have also wanted to show my work straight from computer to a projector through VGA cable. I did a test with a video clip I captured a year ago and projected it through via VGA and it looks great.