Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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It’s very likely that the post house will actually do their work (grading, graphics, etc) in a 24 bit RGB colour space, so the question that arises is where and when that conversion takes place. When I was a staff editor (I’m now freelance) we preferred to take the most raw unprocessed source and be in control of the conversion ourselves, but that might be different in your particular case. Could be worth a call to a technician the post house in question.
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Well, the codecs aren’t the same and there’s a bunch of differences. DVCPRO HD uses 4:2:2 colour sampling, where the red, green and blue parts of an image are processed into Y (luminance, which is brightness) and U and V, which are called the colour difference signals (also known as R-Y and B-Y or Pr and Pb) and those colour difference signals are recorded with half the resolution of the luminance. The upshot of that is that a TV picture has lower colour resolution than brightness resolution, and gets away with it as the human eye is much better at seeing detail in brightness than in colours (a full explanation is a bit more lengthy, but that’s the gist of it). 24 bit RGB doesn’t reduce the resolution in any way, so it’s going to be something like twice the data of a 4:2:2 encoding even before you take into account any other data compression techniques (which is what accounts for the rest of the size difference).
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The uncompressed 24 bit setting is theoretically better than the DVCPro HD, so if you were to convert something that was Uncompressed 24 bit to DVCPRO HD you would theoretically be reducing the quality, but it’s not going to add anything that’s not already there, so although it would do no harm to go up to uncompressed, there’d be nothing gained, except perhaps if the post house couldn’t handle DVCPRO HD.
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What they want is the quicktimes in the original format, without having any further processing done to them at all, e.g., changing the codec, as that’s the best way for them to maintain quality. (24 bit is right, as that’s 8 bits, i.e., 256 defined levels, per colour channel.)
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Set the Still/Freeze Duration in the User Preferences to 1 (or whatever you want each frame to last) then import the folder with the stills in into FCP. Open that folder in the browser and make sure that the stills are in number order, then select all and drop them onto a timeline. Then go for a coffee while it renders.
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A file ending .mov is a quicktime, but quicktimes can be made with many different codecs and that’s almost certainly the problem (a gigabyte is pretty big, so it’s probably not a reference). If you can find out from your supplier which codec they used you might be able to download it so that Quicktime Player can play it.
I’m not familiar with .AVD files (and 2 completely different things came up when I googled it, so I’d prefer not to speculate).
If you’re on a PC you could try downloading VLC Player – no guarantees but it can often play back files that nothing else recognises.
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The main benefits are that Compressor has lots of presets so you don’t have to get hung up on loads of technical details (unless you want to, in which case you can get at everything) and that I find it more efficient to have it processing in the background while I get on with something else.
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Yes it should do. My preferred way to do a DVD is to export a quicktime from FCP in it’s Current Settings and then make the file(s) to burn onto a DVD with Compressor, which has presets for doing that.
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I recently had an interlacing problem and it was solved by choosing appropriate settings in the Frame Controls box in Compressor and not allowing it to do that automatically.
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Erm, DV footage in Standard Def NTSC is 720 x 480 pixels and the pixel aspect ratio should be NTSC-CCIR601 (and not checked as anamorphic). That’s because (for complicated historical technical reasons) SD video uses non-square pixels. As long as those settings are right on both source clips and sequence the computer will display the pictures properly, i.e., 4:3.