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Xpress pro to DVD
I recently got Adobe Encore 2.0 and it’s a great program. I burned a dvd from Avid Xpress Pro w/mojo. I exported it as a quicktime reference and then converted it to mpeg in Sorensen Squeeze. After burning the disc in encore, the image looks good but the video is “jittery” or shaky at times. It’s also stagnant and pixelated. This happens randomly. Some shots are cool but it messes up pretty steadily throught the video. And the video is only 4 minutes long.
So am I missing something? Cuz the process I used, normally works fine. But all of a sudden it started acting up like this.
Thanks for your help!!!
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1 Reply
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Yep, you missed something. I was pulling my hair out over too this before I figured it out. I just hope you have more left than I do!
Here’s the scoop – Avid makes a big deal about being able to render DV material at 1:1 and mix resolutions, and that’s great to maintain the highest quality when you are laying the program back to tape, but when you are trying to make a DVD, you’ve created a nightmare for yourself by mixing resolutions.
Unless the program is really short, exporting by Quicktime reference is really your only choice because there is a 2 gig file size limit in Avid. Think about what a quicktime reference is for a moment…it appears to be a single quicktime clip, but it it composed of every audio and video clip in your program. If you have DV25 at 720 x 480 with 4:1:1 colour and no setup and 1:1 at 720 x 486, 4:2:2 colour and setup at 7.5 IRE (This is NTSC, PAL specs differ), then what codec is Quicktime supposed to use? Well, the short answer is that Quicktime gets confused by this. The result is exactly what you described.
I had all but given up on Avid for DVD and used to dump the program to tape and then digitize it back in with Windows Movie Maker (that has no 2 gig file size limit) and then use these files to make my DVD with no problem. So what was the difference? Although one was a quicktime and the other an avi, I concluded that the biggest difference is that there is only a single codec in the Moviemaker file. So rather than keep doing this stupid workflow of going out to tape and back, I tried doing a video mixdown to one codec and to be safe, I also did an audio mixdown to avoid any funky plugin issues and I sent that to Sorensen through the “send to” under the file menu. Lo and behold! It worked. No more jitters and pixelization.
Now, I knew the jitters were a result Sorenson rendering out only a single field. There is a setting in Sorenson to deinterlace the video and it is on by default. At first I thought that was the problem, but no matter how I set this, the result was always the same mess. It was the mixed resolution that I seemed to always end up with in my Avid sequences. The mixdown was the answer, as long as you remember to turn off deinterlacing in Sorenson.
I hope that helps. It take a bit more disk space to make a mixdown, but heck, hard drives are so cheap now, I am packing well over a terrabyte where 7 years ago we were impressed when someone had more than 144 gigs of storage.
I hope this explains what is going on for you.
Blessings,
Dennis
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