Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
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Totally understand Kibo. Hope I didn’t come off angry in the last response, that definitely was’t my intention. Forgive me as I didn’t pay attention to this before, but are you encoding to the MS MPEG-4 codec? Have you been able to try encoding to WMV9 and see if the issue still occurs? The conversion of RGB to YUV (Windows Media is a YUV 4:2:0 format) can sometimes cause these shifts, but it probably doesn’t apply here because you have reported that play back from MP Classic is fine.
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Most of the editing I do is on a mac and then the Windows Media encoding is done on a PC. On the PC, I use uncompressed source files in AVI YUY2, UYVY, and YV12 formats. On the mac, it is mostly uncompressed QTs in Targa and BlackMagic 8 and 10 bit formats. I have seen shifts of color when using BlackMagic 8bit to compress on the PC, but beyond that, the color and saturation of encodes from the other formats matches pretty well to the editing samples when properly QCed. I’m not arguing that you are noticing a shift of some kind. And I am not that this may be unacceptable for you. But it is curious that it is that noticable and I’d like to get to the bottom of this.
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Well, I can’t completely agree with your statement that WMP does the oversaturation no matter what. I work with encoding Windows Media everyday, and I have seen the issue with Quadros, but not to the same extent with GeForces (using 7800 GTXs and 6800GTs). While you can’t trust that your color will look the exact same on any system with material that is to be distributed online, it definitely shouldn’t be so bad like that which you describe. I would suggest updating drivers and the OS. I know I get very accurate color if I use Windows Media Player to output to an SDI monitor.
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Yes, as Phil mentioned, H.264 should not be used for making a STB playable DVD. Only use MPEG-2 for this. To calculate your necessary bitrate to fit 2 hours of footage onto a 4.3GB disc, I would suggest downloading a bitrate calculator from macupdate.com or using the web-based one at 3ivx: https://www.3ivx.com/support/calculator/
You should use your sequence in Compressor as a source without converting it to another format first. Compressor 2 has a pretty solid MPEG-2 encoder and should be able to encode your material at the desired bit rate with nice quality. If you are looking for a simple “press one button” type of DVD creation app, then both Toast 7 and iDVD 5 will do a fine job, although the video MPEG-2 quality probably won’t be up to the exact level that you can get from either Compressor 2 or some other dedicated MPEG-2 encoders.
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There are definitely much better codecs to use than MS MPEG-4v2. Windows Media 7,8, or 9 are better options, but I am not sure of compatibility in an AVI wrapper (I think v7 and 8 will be fine). Probably the best bet is to encode using either the DivX 5 or XviD codecs. You just have to make sure that the end user has either decoder installed. If you don’t want to worry about that, then I would suggest you reinstall Cleaner and see if it “shows” up again.
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You may be able to get around this with an app like VirtualDub or Movie Maker that comes with Windows XP. The trick is finding an app that does not respect QT’s do not save function, but most “respectable” apps follow this.
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If you are looking for one format for all needs, then I would suggest either Real 10 (although it has quite a bit of animosity against it these days from the public due to a rather bloated piece of software) or Windows Media 9. In both cases, ProCoder 2 from Canopus is a good bet to invest in. And if you need more advanced or specific features, then Rhozet Carbon Encoder is a great tool.
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I don’t believe some versions of Compressor will mux MPEG-1. I think 1.2.1 did, but versions prior to that could not. If for some reason you are forced to use an earlier version, and can only output elementary MPEG-1 streams, then I’d recommend BitVice Helper or MPEG StreamClip (both free). There is also ffmpegX ($15) which will do a better job encoding the video to MPEG-1 than Compressor. But it can be difficult to use for some.
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So I’m confused… are you saying that the final output you have is H.264, or did you go from HDV to H.264 and then to MPEG-2? Could you please detail your process further and specify what the framerate was? Thanks.
If you are working in HDV and higher, then the downconversion Compressor 2 would have done to DVD resolution should have been very good, at least in my experience. I’d be very interested in seeing a short piece of the source sequence and testing this if you’re interested.
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Are you using an nVidia Quadro graphics card to display these? If so, there is a long standing but not well-known bug with the drivers (due to OpenGL rendering) and the way it displays windows media content in Windows Media Player. That is why players such as Media Player Classic and VLC do not have the same problem. Switching to a GeForce or ATI Radeon will solve this.