[Brent Altomare]

Here’s the problem… Going SDI out, when I have my FCP Easy Setup set to KONA2 – 1080 23.98, I get garbage on the deck. When I set it to KONA2 – 1080 29.97, I get picture and audio, but it introduces the pulldown to the image.

Can’t I lay back at 24FPS since I’m styaing high def?

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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY

[Brent Altomare]

Thanks Walter… I’ll double check all my steps just to be sure I’m not missing something.

I did go through the menus on the deck and set it for 1080i. I was having some trouble getting the video to show on the deck from SDI, but now that I’ve had a good night’s sleep (well… “a night’s sleep”), maybe I’ll see where my problem was.

Basically, when going out SDI, I was getting garbage on the screen, which implies to me that I had a FCP or a 1200a setting wrong, but I wasn’t able to figure out which.

I’m heading into the office now. Will give an uptate in a bit.

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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY

[Brent Altomare]

Ah! Yes. I’ll check to see this morning. Any hint to what the pulldown cadence SHOULD be set to? Right now, I’m sure it’s set to the default.

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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY

[Brent Altomare]

Yikes… you got me on this one… there’s a FCP preference to set your pulldown? Time to RTFM, I guess.

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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY

[Brent Altomare]

That still doesn’t look very good. That is definately my “fallback” position, but I’m hoping that I’m overlooking something that will give me a smoother conversion.

Thanks for the response, Jeremy!

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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY

[Brent Altomare]

So here’s the resolution(s)

1) QuickTime 6 has the MPEG2 output option, QuickTime 7 doesn’t. If you UPGRADE from QT6, you retain the option, if you directly install QT7, you don’t have it

2) It appears that going to a 1-pass method of encoding has solved my Compressor quality issue (as much as I still think it’s weird).

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with suggestions! Once again, the COW comes through!

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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY

[Brent Altomare]

Thanks Alexander –

I’m giving this suggestion a try now.

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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY

[Brent Altomare]

I’ll check BitVice out. Thanks for the suggestion!

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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY

[Brent Altomare]

Sounds like that’s what happened. Makes sense.

I didn’t think to try a single pass VBR… I would have thought that would make the problem worse, not better…

But hey… I’ll give anything a go at this point! I’ll switch to a single pass VBR and run an output on Monday to see what happens.

Actually, now that I think about it, if that really does solve the issue, that would explain why the output from QuickTime player would look better than the Compressor output. I’m sure that the output from QuickTime player would be a simple single pass… which would also explain why QuickTime player is faster at compressing the MPEG2 than Compressor…

OK… now you’ve gone and gotten my hopes up. I’ll let you know if they get dashed.

Thanks!

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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY

[Brent Altomare]

Thanks for the suggestion Simon.

We did quite a bit of playign around with compression markers and even tried to futz with the GOP structure to see if that gave us any improvement.

I’m also a little concerned that the problem may be related to our work in DV. I’m going to see if I can take one of our uncompressed projects (we have one right now that originated in HDCAM) and try to reproduce the problem.

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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY