Andrew Ford
Forum Replies Created
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IF you want a lot of bang for a little bit of buck, try the nvidia geforce 9800gtx+. it beats out a large portion of the ATI line and the old Quadro cards. It isn’t as good as the new Quadro or the 200 series, but for around $99-129 (depending on how much you feel like searching priceline.com), it works extremely well in 3d programs and AE.
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There are very limited situations where one actually “needs” the new Quadro card when considering the whole price to performance issue. The 200 series has more than sufficient cards for anything most professionals will do… good enough that any bottleneck isn’t going to be the GPU’s fault. Old Quadro cards aren’t really worth it, since the 200 series, and even the upper 9 series models, beat the pants of those cards.
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Regardless of whether there is or isn’t a problem with long form projects in Premiere CS4, 4GB of RAM is brutally low for Vista 64. Without CS4 installed and without any setting tweaking/adjusting, your system is going to use 2-3GB of RAM doing not much at all. 8+GB of RAM will help performance and will help you get what you paid for with Vista 64.
What mobo chipset do you have? What is the cache/bus speed? These factors make a difference. It also effects the efficient with your video card. By the way, the new Nvidia cards beat ATI in all benchmark tests that matter depending on the mobo and other factors they are coupled with.
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If I bring in raw footage from my camera with the Sony Transfer software, I’m going to have 1080i60 HDV video. So, I’ll edit in FCP with a sequence in that setting. When editing is complete, I’ll export to a file similar to sequence settings and keep that as my master. If I’m in AE, I’ll work in the HD 1920×1080 29.97 sq pix setting.
That master file is only going to get compressed one time from here to the Blu-ray disc. I am unclear if you are compressing twice more when you said:
“I have tried compressing 1080i 60 HDV to dvcpro, 422 apple pro res,H264, mpeg2 and other formats before bringing into either toast 9 or CS4 Encore to compress with them and Compressed those various formats in compressor and imported those files to Toast and Encore.”
If you are doing it twice, you’re going to get bad video. Also, if you are bringing in an already compressed file… make sure Encore is recognizing your already compressed file and not compressing it again. Check under the tabs and see if it says it will transcode or not.
I’ll put the master in Sorenson Squeeze and tweak some of the stock BD settings to my liking. What I tweak to depends 100% on the specific video I’m working with, and it can be different in different situations. However, I just took a master file in Encore CS4 right now and let Encore do the transcoding with default settings and when I burned the disc, the video looked fine. There was a slight difference in gamma and it doesn’t look exactly as clean as the master, but it was pretty darn close. You can adjust for the gamma shift. Also, if you view the Blu-ray video on a large monitor and stand a few steps back, it looks pretty crisp. If you stand 6 inches from it, it does not… but no one really does that.
I have no experience using Toast to burn a Blu-ray from scratch. I just use Toast for duplicating, and the duplicates turn out like the master disc, but that is to be expected. If you are still having issues with darkness and quality even when you compress only once and correct for gamma shift, then hopefully someone else will take a crack at solving this issue. Good luck!
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I use Encore CS4 as my main means of making Blu-ray discs. Toast 10 is only used in my workflow for quick duplication or making data discs for backup. I have similar source footage to what you listed above, and I’ve also made Blu-rays out of 1920×1080 AE mographs. I don’t use Compressor because I have had some trouble, and from various forum posts I gather I’m not the only one, with getting Encore to recognize/like a Compressor-made .m2v. Calls to Adobe tech support in December seemed to confirm that there is some type of issue, but there might be workarounds or solutions. I avoid the whole issue altogether by using another compression software, like Sorenson Squeeze. I have also let Encore do the compression when I first started doing Blu-ray. I got good results using both mpeg2 and h264. There were very slight color and contrast differences noticeable, but I didn’t notice it to the scale that you are… and my discs have gotten a work out in many different monitors/viewing situations in many different countries. There are articles and posts about compensating for gamma and other shifts when using h264 differences if you are getting more extreme results that way.
Are you burning in Toast or Encore? Or both?
Are you using mpeg2 or h264 compression?
Is the darkness of the video the main problem you are experiencing, or are there more problems that that? -
If you are having Toast do the DVD encoding, be sure to check the settings. On Toast 10, for example, when you are doing Video>DVD-Video, there is an Options menu on the bottom. This menu has a choice for automatic and custom encoding… Furthermore, you can click the “More” button to view the encoding settings, which include options such as aspect ratio, quality, format, etc.
Or, you can just go out of FCP into Compressor (.m2v and .ac3) and out to DVDSP and most likely get a better quality result. -
Most people don’t use PCM audio for DVDs because of file size concerns. It takes up a lot more space than the .ac3 file would, mainly because PCM is uncompressed over most of the frequencies. PCM is excellent quality, but should only be used if your .ac3 file is giving you noticable distortion. .ac3 will support surround sound. .ac3 files have very good quality considering that they are very compressed (bitrates can be 10% of typical pcm bitrates). Find a bitrate that works for your particular instance… 192kbps is common. I’m not sure if Encore gives you control over too much else, so I use other compression software, where you can control more features, like setting the normalization to -31 dbFS.
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I agree with the above post. I’ve used the LaCie d2 (bought from B&H) with TDK, Verbatim, and Sony media, both 25 and 50gb Blu-ray, and I’ve had perfect results thusfar using Encore CS4 and Toast 10.
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PCM audio is huge in size…can be 10 times the file size of AC3.
It’s often referred to as uncompressed because most of the compression in PCM is done on the outer frequencies. There is a quality advantage to PCM compared to compressed .AC3, but .ac3 is usually recommended for DVDs because of the good quality in a smaller size. Try to use .ac3 when possible. -
Hopefully, your Windows Vista is the 64bit edition and not the 32. On a PC, 32 bit operating systems aren’t going to recognize, or even show, a 4th GB or RAM, let alone all the RAM you have. Furthermore, on a 32 bit Windows system, your system is probably set by default to use 2GB of RAM on an app. You can go in your boot.ini file and change the /2GB to /3GB to at least use 3GB.
If you do have Vista 64 bit, which the system you have needs, it should run extremely well. Your processors and RAM are more than needed for running multiple CS4 tasks. Your graphics card is extremely good also, although I would say it underperforms at top nVidia card in most of the graphical benchmarks that would matter to a CS4 user, but we’re not here to debate that =)