[Alan Okey]

High resolution images that are imported into in a standard definition FCP project will typically need a slight Gaussian blur applied (.10-.20) to keep the still from “vibrating” on a CRT or plasma monitor.

Of course, in this forum it should go without saying that it is essential to be viewing your FCP projects on an external broadcast CRT for accurate color and interlacing reference so that there are no surprises when viewing the final product on DVD.

[Alan Okey]

The Kona3 will apply realtime 3:2 pulldown in hardware.

[Alan Okey]

Describe how you are making the text bigger. If you’re enlarging the text in the motion tab of the viewer, your text will look jagged. You must select and resize the text within Boris to have it appear crisp.

[Alan Okey]

[Don Greening] “the 720p stuff is anamorphic”

That’s not the case with XDCAM EX, only with DVCPRO HD. 720p in XDCAM EX land is full-raster 1280×720 square pixel. DVCPRO HD is 960×720 anamorphic.

[Alan Okey]

[Hana Backland] “In fact in general I’d like to be exporting the best possible NOT QUICKTIME video to disc for clients “

What do you have against Quicktime? Quicktime is just a wrapper that supports many codecs. It’s much more flexible than .avi or .wmv, and it doesn’t depend on proprietary codecs.

[Alan Okey]

[Phil Beastall] “There is Best Quality – 90 minutes, but thats surely going to compress it 3 times more than it needs.”

Not necessarily. DVD has a maximum combined audio and video bitrate of 10Mbps, which should never be attempted – it will cause problems on some players. Try to keep the total bitrate under 9.5 or even 9Mbps. Try encoding your audio as Dolby Digital AC3 with a bitrate of 192kbps, and the video as MPEG-2 at 6.5-7.5 average bitrate with a ceiling of 8.3-8.5 Mbps.

There is a point in MPEG-2 encoding where increasing bitrate does not improve quality, it only increases file size. Allow the VBR encoder to work as it was designed by setting a moderate average bitrate and a reasonable maximum bitrate.

[Alan Okey]

Part of the problem is that Mac OS X only supports writing to the FAT 32 file system, which has a hard file size limit of 4GB (regardless of file type). Your Quicktime file is probably being truncated or split by the file system, hence the inability of the PC to open it properly.

You should probably invest in Paragon NTFS, which allows Mac OS X to write to NTFS-formatted drives:

https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

What type of footage are you exporting – SD or HD, DV, Uncompressed, etc.? That will help determine the proper codec to use for delivery.

[Alan Okey]

Imagineer Systems’ Mokey can fix this, but it’s not cheap, and there’s a learning curve.

https://www.imagineersystems.com/products/mokey/

Check out the “Mokey at work” section for example clips.

[Alan Okey]

Is your client aware of the many advantages of authoring a DVD with 23.98 footage with 3:2 pulldown flags vs. 29.97 footage?

A quick rundown:

– 20% space savings
– better encoding quality
– better playback on computers and progressive-capable DVD players/TVs (no deinterlacing required)

If you know who the client is using for DVD authoring, perhaps you can contact them directly and ask them to explain to the client the benefits I just listed. Hopefully the authoring house is savvy enough to understand the benefits of working with 23.98 source material vs. 29.97.

[Alan Okey]

David,

The XL2 does not literally record 24 progressive frames per second to tape, it records a 24p signal onto tape over a standard NTSC 29.97fps interlaced signal. This gives the look of 24p when played back, but the footage is not truly native 24p.

3:2 pulldown is the term used to describe how a 24fps signal is recorded on 29.97i. Three whole frames are recorded, followed by two frames that are split between two fields. If W=whole and S=split, the pattern (also called a cadence) is WWWSSWWWSSWWWSS, etc. If you record a movie off of an NTSC broadcast, then step through it frame by frame, you will see this same cadence. Read this link for details:

https://www.adamwilt.com/24p/index.html#24pRecording

The Canon XL2 does not have an Advanced Pulldown mode like the Panasonic cameras. Therefore, Final Cut Pro cannot automatically remove the 3:2 pulldown when capturing footage. You must use Cinema Tools in order to do that with 24p non-Advanced footage.