[Brian Klein]

Just figured out how to capture from the AJ-SD93… I’ve detailed my method below in case anyone is curious, but the video still looks bad in my video monitor…hmmm

Open the capture window, go to the settings tab, click on edit, choose capture from the left-hand list of options, choose Quicktime from the pop-up menu, click on video, go to the source tab, and AJ-SD 93 is an option there.

In order to get device control, I chose DV/HDV Device Control in the Device control box pop-up menu, then clicked on options and used these settings: NTSC, Panasonic, Alternate 1, Auto Detect.

[Brian Klein]

Apparently the MS-DOS drive was the problem… I reformatted the drive to MAC OS Extended, and had them recopy FCP project onto the newly formatted drive, and everything is now good to go.

[Brian Klein]

It was brought to me via firewire drive… after some investigation, I found out it is a MS-DOS formatted drive. I’m assuming this is probably where the problem is?

[Brian Klein]

From Charles Simonson: I really do think your issues could be solved with either Compression Master (very good MPEG-1) or MainConcept (if you look at my many previous posts, you will see that Squeeze does license the Mainconcept encoder in their app but does a terrible job implementing it).

Brian Klein: I don’t doubt that Compression Master or MainConcept would be a better route. Unfortunately, I do not have these programs, and I do not plan on doing much, if any MPEG 1 in the future… not that it would be bad to have Compression Master as another tool. So what is wrong with the way Squeeze implements the MainConcept encoder?

I really do not think the issues I was having had to do with interlacing or deinterlacing. It’s hard to describe what the compression artifacts look like through these posts. I could post a movie somewhere of pre and post movies to prove it. I thought maybe there might be some weird QT bug in the release I had… it seems these kind of issues pop up now and again.

Thanks to all for all the thoughts and advice!

[Brian Klein]

So from what I’m reading above, I should use a deinterlacing filter, even if I am working with progressive material? I do all my preprocessing in After Effects, and as I’ve posted above, I have deinterlaced in After Effects, so I can let the compressing program do what it is meant to do. Compression. The issue I was having probably had more to do with nearby luminance levels or something like that… if the lines in the archeticture were completely horizontal or vertical, I wasn’t having any issues, but when the buildings were shot at an angle, the lines in the archeticture were at angles and would look more like stairs instead of a straight line. I guess it’s pretty hard to describe without sending stills of what I’m talking about.

[Brian Klein]

I don’t believe the poor results were from deinterlacing issues. I was seeing blocky artifacts on slanty lines from the footage in the video.. not the combing issues you get with interlaced footage. I rendered progressive files from AE, and they looked crystal clear. The progressive files were then encoded through Squeeze.

I have actually re-installed an old copy of Cleaner 5.1.2 that I had long since forgotten about on my system and compressed it using that, which worked. Well, the quality is similar to the original compression I did 3 years ago, but it still doesn’t look fantastic, but that’s what you deal with when using MPEG 1.

I did try Compressor, but got similar results as Squeeze. That’s why I thought maybe it had to do with QuickTime.

Is Squeeze known for good MPEG 1 video? I’m not sure that it is, so I don’t know if I should have expected it to perform well. I was surprised to see that Cleaner outperformed Squeeze, though.

One day I will never have to compress to MPEG 1 again, and it will be a good day!

[Brian Klein]

This is for a video we updated that eventually lands on CD-Rom, via a Director presentation, and the client doesn’t want any of the specs to change because it has worked well for them. We have suggested something like Windows Media or Flash, but they decided aganinst it.

Here’s the workflow I’m using:

1. Export from FCP self contained (DVCPRO 50, 720x480i)
2. Bring this into AE and deinterlace using a method found on the Creative Cow site: https://tinyurl.com/e72wm
(All I did was use the files I downloaded from the site, replaced the movie files, and changed the lengths.
3. Scale to 320×240 (also 352×240) and render out progressive to the animation codec (also tried Sorenson 3 at the highest quality, hoping for some wacky reason it would work.)
4. Bring into Squeeze with these MPEG settings:
Method: 2 pass VBR
Data Rate: 770 (and up)
Format: Unspecified (and NTSC)
Frame Size: 320×240 (and 352×240)
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.000 Square Pixel
I Frame Rate: 15

There are shots of archeticture where the building lines slant across the screen, and when encoded to MPEG there is some serious stair-stepping like effect going on. I’ve also tried to bring the source file in and scale it down in Squeeze and I get identical results. Even when increasing the data rate to the likes of 1440Kbps.