[Ad Van diem]

Hi Ron,

I ran into exactly the same problem last night (that’s how I found this thread). My material is HD (EX3 1920×1080) and edited natively in FCP, using an XDCAM EX 1080i50 timeline. I need to compress this to dvd (SD MPEG2). I’ve sent my project to Compressor from FCP, and used Apples standard “DVD: Best Quality 90 minutes” setting. The result is exactly as you describe: a sequence pulsating with a blocky frame each ± 1 sec. Unusable. The problem isn’t there in the first minutes of the output, it starts after around 5 mins into the program, gets worse and then disappears again.

I haven’t found the root cause of this problem yet.
Maybe you can help. A few questions:
– are you using any filters or scaling in the sequences in FCP? (some of the clips in my sequence are scaled to 105%)
– are you using any transcoding in between timelines in FCP? (eg EX material on ProRes timeline)
– are you using any HD/SD up/downscaling between FCP and Compressor? (I do: HD > SD)

Has anyone else run into this problem before? Any help from this forum is appreciated!