[Adam Carrier]

Hi Chris:
I’m trimming the 6 pixels (4 from the top and 2 from the bottom) to convert broadcast video for edit and then final output for an MPEG2 media player appliance. The MPEG2 video I get from Compressor will have green artifacts if I use 720×486 as my input dimensions.

The white rectangle thing is just odd. I’ve never encountered it before.

I’m going to see if Adobe Premiere can output the 480p I need without the rectangle issue –as I’m thinking of switching to Premiere anyway after this whole FCPX storm.

Adam Carrier
Digital Media Technician
acarrier{at}marinersmuseum{dot}org
The Mariners’ Museum
http://www.MarinersMuseum.org

[Adam Carrier]

Rick Young’s tutorial is good, but I wasn’t satisfied with the MPEG2 encodes I got. I now get better looking HD to SD MPEG2 encodes using AviSynth and HC Encoder in Windows; both are free apps.

Basically, I transcode my Apple XDCAM EX 720p60 to ProRes 422 @ 720p29.97. I then put the ProRes MOV file on my Windows PC (make sure the Windows QuickTime ProRes codec is installed). I then make an AVS script file to feed the MOV into HC Encoder. I tweak some of the HC Encoder’s settings, click Encode, and out pops my MPEG2, which looks much cleaner than my XDCAM HD->SD DV->Compressor MPEG2.

Let me know if you want specifics on this workflow, and I’ll type something up that’s more in-depth. It’s worth a try.

Adam Carrier
Digital Media Technician
acarrier{at}marinersmuseum{dot}org
The Mariners’ Museum
http://www.MarinersMuseum.org

[Adam Carrier]

Hello Michael:
The easiest way to glance at the sequence settings and the clip formats is to use the Browser window in Final Cut Pro. If you scroll through the Browser window, you can see columns with headings like “Frame Size”, “Compressor” (the codec type), “Vid Rate” (fps), and “Pixel Aspect”.

Perhaps that’s too basic an answer. Hope it helps.

This might be useful to you also…
Outside of Final Cut Pro, I often use a free application called MediaInfo (https://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en) to help identify compression profiles for my clips. This helps when someone gives me a video file to work with and I don’t know how it was encoded or what bitrates were used.

Adam Carrier
Digital Media Technician
acarrier{at}marinersmuseum{dot}org
The Mariners’ Museum
http://www.MarinersMuseum.org