[Ben Waggoner]

Any chance you could post a link to the file so we can download it and test it ourselves?

I’d be happy to get someone on the codec team to take a look at it and see if they can figure out what’s happening.

[Ben Waggoner]

I’m sure I covered this in there somewhere…

Anyway, I recommend you stay away from non-peak constrained VBR. There’s pretty much always a maximum peak you’d want to use in a particular application, even if it is crazy high. There’s no downside to specifying a peak.

[Ben Waggoner]

Any modern software DVD player should interlace the video before it goes out to the projector. A good DVD player with interlaced source will upconvert with adaptive deinterlacing to 480p60. If you deinterlace before encode, the best you can get out is 480p30, so I’d keep the interlacing assuming you’re using a good player.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

It’s the best I’ve tested for Mac.

The best I’ve tested overall is ProCoder on Windows.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

I’ll certainly be doing my part to make the world safe for accurate SMPTE 709 playback!

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

And if you’re testing for a particular application, nothing beats testing the kind of content you’re expecting to use as source. The closer your test source is to what you want to use, the better.

[Ben Waggoner]

Note that the next-gen HD optical disc formats support MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1. I think VC-1 has some meaningful technical advantages over H.264 in this area.

If you’re making content for DVD today, you need to use MPEG-2. That’s the only supported codec.

[Ben Waggoner]

WMV is really a very good web format – not sure why it would be a throwaway.

Also, Squeeze 4.2 won’t be released for Mac. The next release will be 4.3, and it’ll be cross-platform.

[Ben Waggoner]

Well, if you’ve only got 29.97p source, getting 59.94i will require motion interpolation, which is really slow. Compressor can do this, as can the Algolith and Twixtor plugins for After Effects. However, even in SD, assume an hour or so of rendering per minute of source even on a fast computer.

[Ben Waggoner]

By “MPEG codecs” do you mean “M-JPEG” codecs? If so, that’s your problem. There’s a bug with RGB<>Y’CbCr color space conversions with Motion JPEG in QuickTime 7. I’ve moved to using the FCP 4:2:2 8-bit uncompressed codec for all my intermediates, which has eliminated the problems across the board.