What’s the secret to saving movies?

[Chris Poisson]

Ted,

If your source is DV it ain’t gonna get better no matter what you set it at. Also, if you’re looking at your movie in QT on a computer, it will look much worse than it would from FCP on a good NTSC monitor.

[Rich Rubasch]

And don’t save with Quicktime Using Conversion…Just save as Quicktime movie, and make Self contained…this will make a clone of your clip in FCP…the first way actually recompresses the clips and significantly degrades them if you select the DV codec.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Francois Stark]

Exported DV movies can look a lot better. Open the movie in quicktime, press apple-J to get the movie properties. Select the video track and go down to quality. Select “high quality enabled”. By default it is off – duhh, apple why???? Switch it on and look in awe and wonder at the new-found quality.

You have to save the file again to save this setting, otherwise QT will remember high quality as off.

Regards
Francois

[Mark Spencer]

It’s off by default so that the movie will play on older, slower computers – high quality requires a higher data rate. That being said, it’s on by default in QT7.

—
Mark Spencer
Freelance Editor/Producer
Apple-certified instructor, Final Cut Pro and Motion
Author, Motion Visual Quickstart Guide from Peachpit Press (coming soon)
https://www.applemotion.net

[Solie Swan]

Go to http://www.synthetic-ap.com and they have a free application that you just drag and drop your DV movie on and it sets the hi qual flag for you – handy when you have a bunch of clips. Not sure if it works under QT 7 though.

[Chris Poisson]

Hey all,

All of the above replies about HQ in QT should not be intended to omit the need for a decent NTSC monitor.

[Ted_kazear]

Thanks for all the insight. One of the steps I am a little confused about is when you edit a video in FCP then you want to author it to dvd what are the steps.

Do you first make a quicktime movie , then put it in sorenson , then dvdpro, or do you not make a quicktime movie using fcp at all.

I tried all the above methods, and my movies has choppy (pixel) edges especially on images that are in motion.

[Ted_kazear]

I used quicktime conversion and it looks allot better that just saving it as a quicktime movie under self contained current settings. It was all blurry.

I Used QT conversion and set compression to non, millions of colors, and left everything else unchecked.

[Don Greening]

If your project’s destination is DVD then export a quicktime movie from within FCP using the DV NTSC 48 codec. Export your .mov without the audio. Once that’s done you can then export the audio only as a self contained stereo file. The reason for this is because you want to use A.Pack to compress your audio down to a 192 bit rate (for stereo L & R) that will take up far less space on your DVD than the original .aif file. This will leave you more room on the disc for video encoded at a higher bit rate than would be possible if the audio was still part of the QT movie.

Import your audio file into A.Pack, choose the stereo L & R preset then drag your file to each of the speaker icons. Set encoding bit rate to 192, dialogue normalization to -31 dBFS (so the volume doesn’t change). Click on the preprocessing tab and set compression preset to none. Change nothing else then click on encode.

Import your .mov file into Compressor and use one of the presets for encoding into MPEG2 for the DVD, or you can create a custom preset if you wish. Notice that there is no step in the process that includes the Sorensen codec that you mentioned.

Once your .mov is compressed into MPEG2 then import both the resulting .m2v and the .ac3 files into DVDSP. Drag both files at the same time into a new track and they will line up just fine.

The above workflow is rather a quick and dirty explanation. if you need more info don’t hesitate to ask.

– Don

“Parts left out cost nothing and cause very few service problems”

[Mitchji]

[Francois Stark] “Exported DV movies can look a lot better. Open the movie in quicktime, press apple-J to get the movie properties. Select the video track and go down to quality. Select “high quality enabled”. By default it is off – duhh, apple why???? Switch it on and look in awe and wonder at the new-found quality.”

Hi,

Does this setting effect the quality of MPEG2 compression in Compressor or Bitvice?

Does this setting effect the quality when written out to DV tape?

Does this setting effect the quality if the clip is imported back into FCP?

Thanks,

Mitch