Very, very poor quality MPEG2

[David Roth weiss]

[Brian Semple] “Just had a thought over lunch… could I have a faulty MPEG2 codec which Compressor, DVDSP, Toast all use. Because the quality is terrible from all of them. If I make a self contained QT file from FCP it looks fine, apart from interlacing effects which will be my next problem to solve.”

No, I seriously doubt that’s the issue. And, please don’t take offense, but I’ll bet you 8 to 1 that your problem is related to “pilot error.” It’s nothing personal Brian, it’s just the fact that you’re new to FCP that makes pilot error almost an absolute certainty.

If you’d like to solve these problems and develop a foolproof workflow, contact me offline via my website at drwfilms dot com.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Brian Semple]

I’m sure you’re right David… but wish I knew what. Off home now so will get back later. Cheers

[Chris Poisson]

My workflow for this:

Make a standard def timeline anamorphic. Set the compressor to ProRes and set the render settings to high precision YUV and the motion settings to best. Edit your show from your ProRes footage captured however. Render and send to an uncompressed QT movie, send that to Compressor, tell it it’s 16×9 if it doesn’t recognize that, turn on the frame controls, set anti-aliasing to 50 and motion controls to better, deinterlace, and go.

You will get the absolute best quality DVD you can imagine.

Have a wonderful day.

[Chris Poisson]

Compressor is equal to all others in the right hands, assuming it is working correctly. It does not suck. But, Episode is also awesome at making mpeg2 files for DVDs.

Have a wonderful day.

[Viktor Kibanov]

David, thanks for responding me. I don´t know why (if you don´t know, I know less) but that worked for me and now it is part of my workflow. My videos at that time were open, endoscopic and laparoscopic surgeries for educative course in the congress (I´m surgeon and urologist in Mexico), one part was taken with Sony HC1, the others – with endoscopic camaras, it was used HDV in Final Cut Pro for external video by Sony (very fine camara with really high definition – viewing directly from camara) and resulting videos in DVD were terrible because of lost details in the picture, so I had to find something, and this forum was very helpful. I tried to use Episode with poor quality results, Sorenson with dark picture (I have some friends with professional equipment). I didn´t mention Toast and iDVD? Terrible with HDV convertion. And looking for help I found your explanation to somebody how to make DVD with really high quality – pass by pass, I took one part from Ken Stone portal and the other part yours – and that was successful finishing.
Now I am looking for AVCHD workflow in Mac (or in PC), but very little helpful yet.
Thanks again. Very professional and generous approach. If you need my professional help – you are welcome.
Regards, Dr. Viktor Kibanov

[David Roth weiss]

[Viktor Kibanov] “If you need my professional help – you are welcome. “

Viktor,

As you can imagine, I hope I won’t require your professional hope, but I’m happy to know you’re there just in case. Thank you.

With regard to deinterlacing, if your end product is displayed as high quality HD, at large sizes, and on computer monitors or projectors, then deinterlace is absolutely the way to go. I assume that’s most likely how the majority of your work is displayed for educational purposes, right?

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Viktor Kibanov]

Hi, David, we know that nobody wants our professional help, but life says…
Yes, the most of our videos are for presentations during courses of some surgical tecniques. I found that we had better quality with progressive video. Few years ago we had to render to mpeg1 (now is the same thing – for power point presentations with terrible videos), but when I changed to Mac I could use Keynote which accepted – mpeg2. So now I have presentations in two modes – for PC and for Mac. We don´t use HD matherial yet, we have HD endocamaras, but the recording is in DVD-recorder, so the jump to HD is impossible yet. Some video footage (open surgery or open part of some surgeries) we take in HDV and now in AVCHD, but then is downscaling. So we are not at the top of the progress. But for home use I try to stay modern and made some home DVD and AVCHD disks and now I´d like to make some Blu-ray movies. Perhaps I´ll buy Premier CS4 with Encore, because Toast 10 with HD plugin doesn´t encode well – my Sony Blu-ray player doesn`t accept the disks that I made, Mac doesn´t accept Blu-ray for reproducing(Toast has its own BD player) or reproduce with stops every 5 seconds. PC is a little better now, BDwriter (LG – I bought it last month) has its own software suit, but doesn´t accept video files made in FCP, Elecard AVCHD encode video but not audio (I tried it with one friend of mine who has some professional equipment for editing). So video editing is my hobby, but now I can´t enjoy it, temporally, sure.
Thanks for your time
Viktor Kibanov