[Alan Okey]

I just went back and re-read you original post. You\’re viewing the MPEG-2 footage in Quicktime player, not the DVD Player app. QuickTime player doesn\’t have the realtime playback deinterlacing feature that DVD Player has, so that\’s why you\’re seeing a less fluid quality of motion. Because you\’re using Quicktime player, you\’re seeing 29.97 frames per second, with both fields being displayed simultaneously in the same frame. Try using DVD Player instead to see if you get smoother playback of your footage.

[Alan Okey]

Out of curiosity, which version if Mac OS are you running? If I recall correctly, the DVD Player app was upgraded with the higher quality deinterlacing algorithm in Leopard and Snow Leopard. Previous versions had a cruder algorithm that resulted in comparitively sub-optimal playback quality of interlaced footage.

[Alan Okey]

Check your deinterlacing settings in the DVD Player app. Using the highest quality setting will make interlaced 29.97 video effectively look like 60p, just like consumer LCD and plasma TVs that have realtime deinterlacing hardware. This will preserve the higher apparent temporal resolution of interlaced 29.97 footage that creates the smoother motion you\’re accustomed to.

[Alan Okey]

[Will Griffith] “FLV, H.264… basically any format in Adobe Media Encoder renders much faster than Compressor. “

Faster, maybe. Quality, not so much. Adobe Media Encoder’s deinterlacing and scaling quality is downright abysmal.

At my day job we actually preprocess output from FCP using Compressor to perform deinterlacing and/or downscaling, using Best for scaling quality and Better for deinterlacing. AME (at least CS4) has no equivalent to the Frame Controls section of Compressor. We output a ProRes intermediate file from Compressor that is then encoded to .flv in AME. The results are substantially better looking than encoding from the original full-res master using AME alone. It does add more time, but the quality improvement is worth it to our clients.

[Alan Okey]

[Mark Fanjoy] “I’m on FC6.06. Has that issue been addressed and will I improve rendering performance with a V7 Upgrade? “

Unfortunately not. In fact, there is evidence that shows that if anything, FCP7 is slower than FCP 6 at rendering. That has been proven to be the case with Compressor:

https://www.barefeats.com/fcp7.html

All we can do is hope and pray that the next version of FInal Cut Studio will bring better optimization for multicore machines and perhaps even 64-bit support, although that hinges entirely on Quicktime becoming fully 64-bit capable first.

[Alan Okey]

Hard drive throughput is not the bottleneck for rendering. Rendering speed is limited by CPU speed and how well the software is optimized to utilize multiple cores/CPUs. In the case of FCP, it\’s not well optimized at all, especially compared to Compressor / Qmaster. This is one of the biggest complaints about the current version of FCP.

[Alan Okey]

CalDigit VR, G-Tech G-RAID

[Alan Okey]

Try posting your question in the Compression Techniques forum for a faster response.

[Alan Okey]

[Karim Daire] “should I transcode the material to ProRes via Compressor or just throw the DV Material in a ProRes Sequence and render it in FCP? “

The latter option is fine. No need to transcode DV to ProRes first, just change your sequence compression setting to ProRes 422 and leave the dimensions at 720×480.

[Alan Okey]

[jim brodie] “thought I’d open the floor to see what people see to be the chief disadvantages of using the DSLR camera over a video camera. “

Postproduction workflow for DSLRs in some NLEs can add a significant amount of time to the process. For example, editing in a Final Cut Pro environment would require you to first transcode all of your DSLR footage to a proper editing codec like ProRes 422 prior to editing. If you have the luxury of time, then it may not be enough of an issue to make a difference to you, but if you’re on a tight deadline and need a short turnaround time, an XDCAM EX workflow would be much faster.