[Craig Seeman]

[Danny2007] “On the encoding side I’m not sure either Compressor or Episode (or Digigami) can output 25Mb/s MPEG-2 at 4:2:2. – This is generally only available on hardware encoders.”

Episode can certainly do MPEG-2 Program streams at 25Mb/s 4:2:2

[Craig Seeman]

My suggestions to Shell and tito.

Flip4Mac Player Pro ($29) allows you to edit .wmv or convert them to .mov. It handles most of those crazy formats used by still camera “movie mode” although there have been some bugs working with some modes. The free player includes the demo mode of the above Player Pro.

If you have Final Cut Pro you should have Quicktime Pro. I find the easiest thing to do is convert those movies to .mov in the DV codec in Quicktime Pro. Then you can edit them without all the rendering in FCP. That should work in iMovie too.

If you’re going to be faced with making changes and need timecode then you should dump those newly created DV movies to DV tape and then reimport through firewire.

[Craig Seeman]

[mlondon] “I also tried the 7Mbps preset which gives me a smaller file, but the preset is 1-pass – I want to use 2-pass, and the preset is bottom (lower) field and my source material is PAL 10bit uncompressed which is upper field.
I made my custom settings by duplicating the preset and changing the data rates, passes and field order.”

Assuming that’s all you changed in the preset, the clues are going to 2 Pass encoding and changing the field from Bottom First to Top First.

Frame type defaults to Progressive. Did you leave that as is or changed that to Interlace?

Are you using Frame Rate and/or Resize filter or any others?

I don’t have any PAL 10 Bit Uncompressed to test with but I can arrange FTP access for you to upload a Gig or two for me to test with. Yes, that’s small relative to an 83 minute project but it might give me a clue.

[Craig Seeman]

Are you using Episode Pro 4.2.2 (latest version)?
Are on PPC Mac or Intel?

Are you saying your 83 minute source file always encodes to 4.3GB regardless of encode settings?

As an experiment try using the Elementry Stream/Video – NTSC (or PAL if that’s the case) 3Mbit preset.

[Craig Seeman]

[Rich Rubasch] “I always like the left right frame shot with a slider to wipe between before and after frames. As you adjust various settings you would see the right side adjust.”

While this is common with processing filters, I’d like to see this with codec/profile settings. Is that what you mean? I’d like to jog through a few frames of a “challenging” section and know what I’m looking at takes into account where things are in a GOP structure and what those frames would look like at a given point in a 2 Pass encode. This might work like a RAM buffer preview.

Being able to embed the time code track where the codec supports it and/or using such to do “Viz code” encodes is something else that would be good.

How about something that actually measures video noise.

[Craig Seeman]

Hi Joe & Curt,

Using the source material, my Profile settings and my Resize Filter settings in Episode Pro 4.2.2, DG FastChannel passed it.

[Craig Seeman]

Hi Joe & Curt,

Using the source material, my Profile settings and my Resize Filter settings, DG FastChannel passed it.

[Craig Seeman]

I hope your cost of living is VERY LOW in your area.

A typical small business model might estimate that you need to cover all business and personal expenses plus make a profit on about 20-25 hours paid work a week. The rest of the hours is unpaid work such as marketing, contact with prospective clients, gear maintenance, other paperwork. Based on that and what you’re charging you’d gross about $300 a week to cover all your expenses including food and housing.

Cost of living can vary greatly across the USA (and other countries as well) but even a college kid with low expenses may well have student loans to pay back. If your business is dependent on word of mouth (as most are) and your aunt mentions the price, be prepared to get stuck with more low paying job offers. If you’re doing her a favor (and in my opinion you are at that pice and that may be OK since it is your first gig) tell her to keep the price quiet.

[Craig Seeman]

What settings are you using?
What is your source video?
Did you look at the settings I’ve posted and test them with all the other processing filters off?
Of course the exact settings may very much depend on your source.

[Craig Seeman]

[Joe Murray] “Does your material start out as lower field first or upper?”

My material was SD lower Field First. Episode converted it to upper field without issue for my DGFastchannel Tests.

[Joe Murray] “This material is very clean, it originated on 35mm film”

But what was it converted to and how? Was it 23.98p or embedded in 29.97 or . . .?

I can email you my preset that passed DGFastchannel but if you’re getting an “interlaced frames” issue It have have something to do with your source vs. your settings.

If you can put your spot on an FTP site I can do some conversions and get them back to you to send to DG for testing. Basically I’d try different ways to get an interlaced result but it may involved some experimentation.