[Chris Gorman]

thank you, I’ll download those. In the meantime, I started playing with the Master Templates, new in fcp6. If you’ve use those and have any advice, pros/cons, let me know. Thanks.

[Chris Gorman]

Thanks for your help and patience. I set up custom settings and have a few questions.

I set the ac3 audio to 320 kbps, no surround. The default preprocessing is film std, low pass filter, dc filter. Should I just leave this as is?

My source audio is cd music direct feed from a board – one channel. 2nd channel is audience/ambient sound. These were set to stereo mix in fcp.

Re: the video . . .though i’m not sure if it’s necessary, but because it’s dance footage, i thought i’d try Open GOP for better quality? (the size stays at 15). My understanding is that with Open GOP I need a high quality bit rate, so set it at 6.0-8.0., Best.

I hope this doesn’t increase compression time to more than the 20 hours it took with the default Apple settings for DVD 90 mins. Ya think it will?

The other settings: In the video format window, ntsc, auto frame rate, aspect ration 16.9, top field first.

I’m stilling having a hard time wrapping my mind around the “Frame Control” setting. I do not want to change the 16.9 of the source video. Should I just choose “Off” Is there any reason I’d need to choose “On”?

[Chris Gorman]

This is compressor 3.0.3. Up to now, I’ve only been using compressor 2. I had several custom setting in compressor 2, but can’t see a way to customize in 3.0.3. All the settings in inspector are greyed out.

I just read the compressor manual re: open vs. closed GOP. It’s still not clear to me if I should leave it at the default, or use open and IP, for this movie with lots of movement (dance).

If I do a custom setting I see I have to choose between 4:3 and 16:9. With my previous encoding test, aspect ratio was set to automatic, and it came out as expected: top and bottom bars viewed on 4.3 monitor, and full screen on HD monitor. In DVDsp I selected 16.9 aspect ratio, but let it at auto in compressor.

Now, if I have to make a custom choice in compressor, I’m not sure what to set it at. The footage is hdv, captured and edited as 8 bit ProRes.

[Chris Gorman]

“You just import your clip to Compressor . On top of your clip you drop the MPG2 preset for the video and the Dolby, or AIFF preset for the audio. That’s all.”

The mpeg-2 preset does not specify, it just says it will do aiff or dolby and doesn’t let me choose which one. I do not want it to do aiff, so I’m reluctant to have the audio attached to the video at all. I thought if I had a separate audio only file, I could drop the dolby preset onto it, and then be sure I had Dolby. Am I wrong about how that pre-set works?

“When you have a shorter movie, you set it in Double pass VBR, Short-open GOPs and you rise the data-rate. You will se a huge difference in the picture of your DVD.”

shorter than what? with my 70 min. movie, if I do VBR, ya think I can also do one of the other parameters you mention above. if so, how much?

If I can have one option but not the others, what’s the best one to choose, eg., increased data rate (how much?) or vbr, or the other you mention, which I don’t understand (short open GOP)?

[Chris Gorman]

“Frame Control” was automatically set of “Off” with Apple’s pre-set. Any reason to do a custome setting and do something with “Frame Control”?

I see that with this pre-set, it does 90 mins. with dolby 2.0, but only 60 mins. with aiff audio. My seq. if 70 mins.

So, in this case, I think it would go to a lesser quality compression rate if I use a QT with combined a/v, which would mean aiff audio.

[Chris Gorman]

I’m on a G5 2.3 dp. 3.5 MB ram.

Is is correct that I first render my TL, or by chance does Compressor re-render anyway? As far as quality and compression time, what’s the best re: rendering before exporting the QT?

[Chris Gorman]

Manual Page 280 Vol.IV, says “The advantage of exporting a sequence to Compressor directly from fcp is that rendering happens as part of the transcoding process, potentially saving you time and eliminating unwanted artifacts”

I had already rendered my sequence because, of course, I needed to evaluate the full image quality etc. So, I guess it just replaces those render files?

10 hours now elapsed and it’s been showing half hour remaining for the past 2.5 hours at least.

If I thought I’d at least end up with good quality for my purpose it wouldn’t be a total waste. However, late last night when I set this up, I did not see any customizable settings after I had dropped the Apple preset for h.264 med. bandwidth download.

I definitely would have done custom tweaking had I seen it. Now, this morning, I’m seeing there are non greyed out choices in the inspector Encoder window (thought for sure these were greyed out last night).

It lists the file format as QuickTime Movie, compression h.264, frame rate 15fps (worries me), key frames every 75 frames (worries me), frame recording, med. quality, best quality multi-pass, restrict to 220 kbits/sec, optimized for download, streaming: fast start (I would have chosen none, instead of streaming).

Geometry: 320 x 240 (ok with me)

To have avoided all this I see now (in the light of day) I could have changed “File Format” in the Encoder window to Mpeg-4 and continued from there, right?

Will the above settings give me such a bad result that I should bail out now even though 10+ have passed?

The footage is a 3 camera shoot of a dance concert shot on Z1Us in hdv, capture and the rest in ProRes 8 bit. With all the movement I want to encode with that in mind.

Later, I’ll be making std def dvds, for now I am just trying out a downloadable (not live streaming distribution) version I thought I might put up on a .mac account.

[Chris Gorman]

Two of the tapes for this project were previously captured as hdv. Should I just drop them into the ProRes TL for conversion, or is there any ultimate quality benefit to re-capturing those as ProRes?

[Chris Gorman]

Thanks for that info.and the white paper. I took a chance 256k would be best, set it up and have been capturing. I’m glad to hear that was the right choice.

FW capture works great so far.

Here’s some numbers: my striped RAID= 931GB. Capturing ProRes Std. 33 min.tape took 43 mins. Lag time started at 8% and was 12% by the completion of the capture (10 mins. lag time). File size – 27.9 GB, data rate = 14.7 MB/sec.

I’ll finish capturing tomorrow and then I’ll see how the multicam edit goes.

[Chris Gorman]

What you describe was a separate little problem I had (not the stream error) which was easily solved when i noticed i had overlooked unchecking that pesky little setting unexpectedly in the clip setting in the log and capture window. when i corrected that, my 45 min. hdv tape captured with no breaks.

BTW, my footage definitely did not have any record stops on the footage, so don’t know why it breaks it up when the box is inadvertantly left checked (it’s checked by default).