Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
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James, you don’t want to add letterboxes to your content. What you want to do is take your anamorphic 16:9 sequence and make a QT movie with it, with the anamorphic flags still present. Then, encode your movie to a 16:9 MPEG-2 at 720×480. This retains all of the original resolution of your source, and the only shimmering you will see may be because of a poor-quality encoder. Once you have a 16:9 MPEG-2, you can then drop it into your DVD suite, tell the app that it is a 16:9 asset, and adjust your display settings for playback. For instance, for a 16:9 track, there are three display settings in DVD SP: 16:9 Letterboxed, 16:9 Pan-and-scan, and 4:3. Selecting 16:9 Letterboxed, automatically generates the letterboxing by the DVD player and displays your 16:9 footage in widescreen on a 4:3 TV. Better yet, if you play back the 16:9 MPEG-2 on a 16:9 display, then there will be no need for letterboxes to be generated (given the DVD player has been setup correctly) and quality will be best. This is what Hollywood DVDs do, and I haven’t seen a letterboxed burned-in DVD release since the initial production of Pulp Fiction back in 1998.
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Yes, the Popwire component should work fine in Cleaner. One thing to note, make sure you create an entirely new preset rather than build off an existing one when using the settings. This is an old bug in Cleaner that occurs with practically any new codec beyond the default shipped. Second thing to note is that the component is either single-pass QUALITY-based VBR, which means to use VBR, the bitrate can’t be set and the quality meter is important; or it is single-pass BITRATE-based CBR, which means the bitrate can be set to a desired output.
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What codec is the 1080i? Also, I have seen the ProCoder problem you’re mentioning on a system with WMP10 as Lisa said. Although, I thought the error to be with the virus protection software, but WMP10 could have been it as well. We uninstalled so much software that I’m not sure exactly what was the problem.
Also, Ryan, shoot me an email, if you would, about the Avel LinkPlayer issues you were having. I may have an update for you if you are still experiencing problems.
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Don’t use the MPEG-4 .mp4 wrapper. Instead, use .mov. Best way to do this is to do an export, and if you want to use MPEG-4 for the video and the audio, instead of selecting Export movie to MPEG-4, select Export movie to Quicktime Movie, and choose the MPEG-4 video codec from the settings list and the MPEG-4 audio codec. You’ll get the same quality as before, just without the .mp4 track overhead.
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Cleaner can do most of the preprocessing using the F4M encoder (its fully QT compatible, so you can export from Cleaner using the F4M encoder) that it does with its own builtin WMV encoder. Basically, if you use F4M inside of Cleaner, your only options that are limited are sizing and interlacing, and these are only limited because the F4M encoder overrides them with its own tools.
As far as quality and speed, quailty with the F4M encoder is light years beyond Cleaner’s WMV encoder. Cleaner only supported WMV7, which wasn’t even close to SV3 standards in its time. F4M uses WMV9, which is backwards compatible up to WMP6.3 on the PC. WMV9 is also considered by many to be the standard bearer of quality for video encoding these days. For speed, well, you’re not going to be able to turn around and the encoding will be done. The F4M encoder is very slow, just like Cleaner’s builtin encoder.
For an alternative, at a much lower price, if all you need is single-pass WMV encoding, don’t forget to check out the QT encoder from Popwire as well. It is also much faster than the F4M encoder, although it is still no where near “speedy”.
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I’d go for the Popwire encoder. Its faster and quality is just as good, all with the same features as F4M. You may want to look at the $179 encoder from F4M though, or the $399 encoding suite from Popwire. Both offer 2-pass WMV (CM3 has many more encoders as well), which will generally provide a much better quality:bitrate movie compared to the 1-pass encoding of the others.
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Didn’t mean it to be [I]too[/I] snotty. 😉 Sorry. Just, spend a couple of days working with someone, who, come to find out, was using a pirated version all along, and therefore doesn’t have the lastest version, and so on, and I bet you can start to see where I’m coming from.
Anyway, back to your initial issue. Have you tried disabling and virus protection software that could be running? It may not be allowing access to the correct libraries. Also, what format is your source? I have had problems in the past with ProCoder and HDV sources.
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Uhh, hate to ask this Ryan, but are you using a pirated/cracked version of Procoder? ;- Although Canopus isn’t known for their software support, I’ve heard this question before; only to find out later, after some extensive troubleshooting, that the user was using a pirated version and the crack he was using wasn’t sufficient.
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Found out what the issue was. From iPhoto, select to export from the “Library Slideshow” source option, not the “Library” source option. Library Slideshow creates an MPEG-4 movie, Library creates a Photo-JPEG Image Sequence.
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Take Gary’s advice here! That, and get to know your VAR real well.