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Video question Urgent, Please Help
I’ve just finished editing a film together and I just output to DVD to see what it looked like. when i watch the video, parts of it look ‘weird’ it looks almost out of focus but very blocky and pixelated. I know this is horrible description but I honestly don’t know what’s going on.
I found out that some of the effects I’d used were set to 24p frame rate and we edited at 29.97. Could that be the problem?
also, for some reason the clips are set to Anamorphic, could that be the problem?It looks almost as if the horozontal lines of pixels are shifted left & right every other line.
Thanks for any help from anyone.
MIke
“Rage against the Dying of the Light”
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7 Replies
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Any help at all…
“Rage against the Dying of the Light”
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Hi there. (Almost be easier to detect what’s wrong by seeing your unpleasant results. Any way of posting a sample on a website somewhere? Just a thought.)
At first blush it sounds simply like poor DVD (mpeg 2) encoding. Are you using Compressor? DVD Studio Pro? You can customize encoding in these programs. You may want to choose “Hi Quality Encoding” and make the video as short as possible per disk, the filesize as large as possible, the disk capacity as large as possible (like using double-layer etc). Don’t go above about 6 bitrate though, otherwise DVD may stutter. If you encode audio as AC3 you will have more room for video information.
Re: Anamorophic. Won’t have anything to do with blockiness on a DVD. Anamorphic setting on clips is appropriate IF your sequence is Anamorphic. And when you author the DVD you want to make sure to flag it as anamorphic (if your show is anamorphic), otherwise the result will be “squeezed” looking on a standard definition TV, that’s all. If your sequence, though, is letterboxed, then you DON’T want to flag DVD’s anamorphic. Letterbox means you “unsqueezed” the anamorphic source clips into a square (3×4 = not wide) sequence. That’s alright, if it’s what you need. Otherwise it is good to stay in format from source to sequence.
Worth noting that if you have DV material not on 0x0 center (in motion tab), it will look slightly blurry if horizontal is on anything other than an exact even line (0,2,4,6 etc.) Again, you will see this on a production video monitor even before you burn a DVD. Motion tab up-scaling or aspect stretching can cause this too.
Re: 24p fx on a 29.97 sequence. What FX are you using? Yes, well, mixing 29.97 interlaced with 24 progressive (without correcting for it with a third party filter like Nattress) can cause a horizontal combing. You should be able to see this on your NTSC production monitor even before burning to DVD. But the combing might be invisible to you if all you are looking at is a computer screen, because there you only see half the lines (every other line). Also, 24p material cut into a 29.97 sequence will be slightly jerky in movement unless you use a third party filter to add a pulldown (the conversion from 24p to 29.97 frame rate – like with Nattress). Again, you would see this on your NTSC monitor before DVD burning.
Hope something in here is helpful.
“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –
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Thank you, that is incredibly helpful.
I’m using Natress for the effects. for some odd reason, when i took the anamorphic setting off, the combing went away. If i can post what I’m talking about I will – I’m using 2 seperate computers for the internet & the editing. i didn’t even think about the up-scaling & shifting – I did a lot of that. I’m still pretty new to this & i forget to watch these things occasionally.I just watched some of the clips on the monitor & the problem seems to have resolved itself. Still I’ll try & post it so that someone can tell me what the problem was in the first place.
mike
“Rage against the Dying of the Light”
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re: poor dvd encoding.
that might be the problem. I am using compressor & chose mpeg2 encoding with a 2pass best quality compression, VBR with an average of 4.5 and max of 7. I’ll try compressing with a max of 6 if that might make things better. But It’s a full 3 1/2 hours on a dvd-9, so I know i’m pushing it. but that’s what the client wants.“Rage against the Dying of the Light”
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Okay, good luck. If all your problems are solved as far as what you see on an NTSC interlaced TV (hooked up to your firewire deck, I presume) then the only concern is getting good enough encoding for your DVD. Bad encoding will give you noticeable blockiness on movement and fast edits.
“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –
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Well, 4.7 to 7 with 2pass best quality compression is actually really good, shouldn’t need better than that. See what the 6 does for you if you’ve got the luxary, but I wonder what’s up.
What program are you authoring the DVD with? A shot in the dark, but I wonder if the DVD program is again recompressing the mp2 you already made. I don’t use iDVD, but I wonder if it recompresses any movie file, regardless of the codec. If that’s the case, might be better off giving the program a native DV quicktime to work with, then you only have recompression occur once.
“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –
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dvd studio pro. i don’t think it’s recompressing. unless that’s a default setting i forgot to remove. i’ll check.
i may not know what i’m doing, but i have great equipment 🙂
“Rage against the Dying of the Light”
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