[Alexander Kallas]

[Neil Weaver] “Rafa, if you’re still following this and I wouldn’t blame you at all if you weren’t, I’ve tinkered some more, got into the Open GOP settings, done some tests and it’s made no discernable difference. The footage looks ok – it always did, but graphics, particularly text are looking soft, fuzzy and pixellated.

Rob, the font was Helvetica! To answer your other question, we have a few systems we use for quality control. The one I most like to use is an old DVD player hooked into a Panasonic LCD via scart. I do this because a) if a DVD looks good on that, it’ll look good on anything and 2) that’s likely to be pretty close to how a lot of clients, or client’s clients will be viewing their DVDs so there’s little point checking things back on a high end system that’s unlikely to be used by regular people.

However, this is all moot now. Encore does the job we need without any of the hassle, so bye-bye DVDSP. You won’t be missed.
“

Neil, the whole point of this debate is to point out that in professional hands DVDSP is a very capable and affordable authoring tool.
Using any of the cheesy templates etc etc in the program is un-profession and leads to some of your complaints.
m2v quality depends on the encoder, tossing media at DVDSP to encode (which uses a limited part of Compressors encoding engine) is sloppy workflow.
These auto steps (a hand me down from iDVD) are enticing for new users, that’s really all.
IMHO all assets should be built outside and assembled in DVDSP.

Cheers
Alexander

[Alexander Kallas]

[walter biscardi] “……Compressor and BitVice are the two you really want to use with BitVice the most superior compression that I’ve seen….”

Walter, have you seen a side by side comparison between m2v files from CinemaCraft and the other encoders (including Bitvice)?
CinemaCraft leaves them for dead!

Cheers
Alexander

[Alexander Kallas]

[Francis Hughes] “Hi,

Before anyone says, yes I have searched the forum on PAL to NTSC, however I really need some clarification if anyone can give me a few minutes of their time to reply.

My project is SD PAL Anamorphic 720×576 25fps etc, I need to go to SD NTSC Anamorphic and produce a DVD for the USA. I’m going to use compressor to achieve this as most posts seem to recommend it.

My question is that I’m lost when it comes to what pixel aspect ratio I should be and frame size. Is 720×480 correct and the pixel aspect ratio 1.1250 (compressors settings when doing NTSC 8bit uncompressed) and that when it is played in the States on a 16:9 capable TV that it will appear 16:9?

Being UK based I have no way to check the DVD before sending so it would be great to get it right first time. Thanks for reading and any help you can give!”

Just to clear this up again, computers can display DVDs in either format. DVD players feed media to a TV which is the device that ultimately displays the media.
NTSC TVs will not display a PAL DVD, you will need to convert to NTSC, and author in NTSC before formatting.
NTSC TVs cannot display both formats, modern PAL TVs can.

Cheers
Alexander

[Alexander Kallas]

[Sam Cole] “Does it work the other way around? Here in PAL land most if not all DVD players can play NTSC. Is that the same with sending PAL DVD’s to NTSC land?
Are NTSC DVD players dual standard? Are US Blu-ray players dual standard?”

Just to clear this up again, computers can display DVDs in either format. DVD players feed media to a TV which is the device that ultimately displays the media.
NTSC TVs will not display a PAL DVD, you will need to convert to NTSC, and author in NTSC before formatting.
NTSC TVs cannot display both formats, modern PAL TVs can.

Cheers
Alexander

[Alexander Kallas]

[Matthew Shaw] ” I just uninstalled Quicktime long time ago because I like Streamclip better.”

…this is just unbelieveable! QT is integral to Final Cut Studio. What are you doing?

Cheers
Alexander

[Alexander Kallas]

Create a disc image of the install disc on the donor Mac, and make your G4 the fire-wire target.
Transfer the disc image to the G4 and open it there.

Cheers
Alexander

[Alexander Kallas]

It’s my English, I copied and pasted into a new project with the correct presets ( and of course including the correct same frame-rate ) The only change was a re-set project duration, that fixed it all.

Cheers
Alexander

[Alexander Kallas]

[Mark Spencer] “You can, however, cut and paste all your layers into a new Motion project with a different frame rate. “

Thanks, copy and pasting into a new Motion project saved alot of re-do, but the new project has the same frame-rate.

Cheers
Alexander

[Alexander Kallas]

Might be a project length problem, read my post:-
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/170/865646

Cheers
Alexander

[Alexander Kallas]

[Mark Spencer] “What is your video source, codec, frame rate, resolution, PAR? “

Source is DV PAL 25fps 720×576.
It comes down to problems between play-range and project duration. I’m on Motion3, and the digital helpfile is not a manual, sailing blind here.
Because there are multiple clips which need to be composited individually, I should have set a project duration as long as the longest clip before compositing,ie prefs need to be set before the compositing is commenced. This is where the error was built.
So the question is, can prefs be altered during a Motion project? Looks like not, they won’t stick.

Cheers
Alexander