Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
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Those settings are quite good and recommended for high-end mobile phone video. If you have a mac, Compression Master 3.1 has an excellent MPEG-4 3GPP encoder. Their encoder is used by a lot of vendors in Asia where streaming 3GP content to mobiles is very popular.
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I’m guessing that the text you created in LiveType is then imported onto a FCP interlaced timeline (also, make sure your FCP render settings were set to Full Quality, as you may have accidentally rendered the text in draft quality). If so, there isn’t much to worry about, as this is normal, because interlaced content cannot be viewed accurately on a desktop monitor. That is why a pro-quality broadcast monitor is so important to a workflow. Even a standard TV does a better job displaying interlaced material than your desktop display. Anyway, to get rid of the quality issues you speak of, when compressing, if doing so for the web or other small format, make sure to de-interlace the content. However, you do not want to do this if you are not scaling down the video or are targeting TVs with MPEG-2 encoding at native size. If you are encoding for DVD, and the primary playback will be with a computer, then you should deinterlace the content, but quality will still suffer if your source is only D1.
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That question is really too vague to answer. It all depends on what you are shooting for. I’d suggest grabbing some videos off the web (if that is what you are encoding for) that are representative of your goals and checking out what they are using for compression meters. Either that or provide way more detail here.
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You are correct in thinking that the higher quality the source, the better chance an MPEG-2 encoder will have in encoding a high-quality movie. The nature of lossy-compression means that your encoded movie will never look as good as the source, but providing the best option for encoding from can help eliminate artifacts you would otherwise see in a lower quality source.
A couple of questions I would ask myself: First, is what format was the video originally shot in? Second, do I expect the edit to contain a lot of titles, effects, and transitions? If you shot the footage in DV25, and there will be some extensive editing for the project, then there might be some validity in capturing it in a different format, like M-JPEG or Uncompressed 8bit. If you shot it in DVCPRO50, then the only other format it would be worth capturing to is Uncompressed 8bit. The reasoning for this is because of DV25’s high compression ratio as you mentioned. When you do a lot of edits and renders to a DV25 project, the quality loses more and more generations. For DVCPRO50, the generational-loss effect is less so, but can still be seen depending on what was done to the project. Of course, with Uncompressed codecs, you need more disk space and better machines for RT, so for some, the cost/benefit ratio isn’t high enough to warrant its use in every project.
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Check the Final Cut Pro forums on the Cow. This issue comes up often over there (look in the archives as well). I have only experienced this with Compressor 1.2, a long time ago, and the 1.2.1 update fixed it. Also, an update for Compressor 2 was just released just yesterday, so see if that helps.
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Hmmm. The results I’ve gotten from Compressor 2 when encoding HD material (using Uncompressed formats, not HDV) to SD MPEG-2 has thus far been pretty good. Much better than with Compressor 1 or any previous Apple supplied MPEG-2 encoder. MUCH BETTER. Even still though, for HD to SD MPEG-2 conversions, my encoder of choice is the MainConcept MPEG-2 mac encoder. Great speed, great quailty, and very reliable.
To better understand where your quality issues are arising from, please post your full settings. Also, if you could upload a small sample of your source and encode, that would make things a lot easier to determine what you are describing.
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The best Real Media encoder in my experience is the encoder available in Popwire Compression Master 3 (PC or Mac). Phenomenal encoding results can be achieved. There is also a free Real Media QT plugin encoder available, as well as an encoder in Squeeze 4, and both do a fine job, but not as good as Compression Master IMO. CM3 also has plenty of builtin presets to easily target and encode for your audience.
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I would suggest the Flip4Mac forum for your query ( https://www.flip4mac.com/fusetalk/forum/ ). I haven’t had the issue you speak of with the F4M encoder (it usually does a pretty good job of achieving its targeted bitrates). And in my experience, Sorenson 4.1 and F4M Pro 1.0.5 work pretty well once you get everything rolling smoothly (admittedly, that can take some tinkering).
Oh, wait, let me guess, you are using QT to tell you what the datarate is, aren’t you? You actually can’t trust that number. Take a look at the actual encoded file-size through the Finder, and then do the appropriate math. I doubt the file is really that far off the target.
As far as Mulit-bitrate encoding, the only way to do that natively on the mac is with Popwire Compression Master 3.1.
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Yes, you have to purchase the Flip4Mac QT exporter plugin in order to encode WMV within Squeeze. It sucks, but because Sorenson didn’t want to build their own WMV encoder for the mac, and because they couldn’t come to a more appropriate licensing agreement with Flip4Mac for using the encoder, you have to pay the full F4M WMV Studio price for the ability to encode WMV on the Mac with Squeeze… even though the PC version of Squeeze offers builtin WMV encoding. Go figure. The least they should have done is made an offer for Squeeze users to buy the F4M Pro encoder for the standard version price.
If you need to definitely encode WMVs on your mac, and don’t want to spend too much more money, then I suggest taking a look at Popwire’s single-pass WMV QT exporter. You won’t be able to use it directly in Squeeze, but could do so from FCP or Cleaner. It only costs $29.
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When I mentioned a quality based setting, it was not in reference to a FCP export setting. Rather it was an inference to Compressor possibly having its own quality setting when encoding to MPEG-2, ie. it would be similar to doing a quality-based VBR encode, which you can’t control as well as a constrained VBR encode. I doubt that your output from FCP has anything to do with the reasoning behind Compressor’s fluctuations.