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Video Encoding
I’m an audio engineer, who’s pretty new to video. My friend and I shot 2 cameras at a concert. His was on miniDV and captured fine into Final Cut.
Mine was a (borrowed) Sony DCR-SR42, which records to internal hard disk. I pulled the video off the camera, and had to use Compressor to convert it to 29.97 DV spec to match the other camera’s captured format. It was at 30fps for some reason.
Everything looks ok inside Final Cut and also the exported Quicktime Final Cut Pro Movie file. However, when I use Compressor to encode it to MPEG2 for DVD, the DCR-SR42 footage looks terrible, while the other camera’s footage looks fine. The DCR-SR42 looks like strobing interlaced madness.
I don’t understand how it can look fine in the exported FCPM file, but then look so different after the encode – and I mean it’s basically unwatchable.
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3 Replies
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[brad hebert] “Sony DCR-SR42, which records to internal hard dis”
So this camera encodes mpeg2 to disc of the chip and you re-encoded it to dv for the edit and now have re-re-encoded to mpeg2 for a 3rd generation of encoding (and probably a different gop structure than the 1st). Aside from the mpeg2 compression process being a lossy process there are other options for error such as field dominance.
I’m not sure exactly what is happening but at this point I would try to lay your timeline off to dv tape since it looks good playing out to a monitor, then re-capture it all as dv and then export to compressor for the encode. You could try a 3 minute segment to see how it looks.
There is no generation loss going from dv to dv as there is no re-encoding.
“everything is broken” ……Bob Dylan
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Thank you. I’m going to try a field shift and see if that works. I may end up trying to export the original mpeg2 tape.
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OK. Switching the fields has seemed to help considerably. There are still some residual lines when the image moves.
Someone recommended that I convert to uncompressed QT, instead of to DV, to edit.
I’m using Compressor. Does anyone know the best settings for this?
When I select “Quicktime Movie” setting, the settings are defaulting to medium quality at 15fps. Since the original files from the camera (mpeg2) showed up as 30fps, I assume that I should set the frame rate to that and put the slider on “best” quality.Actually, now that I’m looking again, the “compression type” at the top was set to “Photo jpeg”. When I switch it to “None”, the frame rate goes to “current”. But the quality still defaults to “medium”. If I switch that to “Best”, will I be converting the best possible way to edit this in Final Cut Pro?
While I’m at it, there are a lot of audio settings. Too many as far as I’m concerned.
Compressor defaulted to “IMA 4:1”. I have no idea what that is. Anyway, my guess is that Linear PCM would be the best. There is an Apple Lossless that sounds like a good option as well. I don’t know what’s best for Final Cut, etc.
Any suggestions?
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