[Craig Seeman]

Some thoughts.

The Uncompressed AVI file might be quite large so that it may be “choking” on playback.
Is there a specific reason why you must use uncompressed AVI? If your source is DV or DVCPro50 you can use those codecs for AVI.

[Craig Seeman]

If you drag the nest into the browser you can Apple or Option drag (I forget which) back into the timeline and you should get the individual shots (“de-nested”) that you need.

This kind of thing is one of my pet peeves about FCP having been an Avid editor for years. If you take a project offline and then at a later point try to capture just the final sequence, it may well try to recapture the entire clips rather than just the sections in the timeline. I believe one of the “fixes” in 5.1 is the ability to media manage an offline project though.

[Craig Seeman]

iDVD now handles up to 2 hours (and has for a couple of versions).
I’d export a Quicktime Self Contained Movied at “Current” (Sequence codec) settings and drop that into iDVD.

[Craig Seeman]

Don’t have an Intel Mac yet (but that’ll happen for sure). I’d imagine BootCamping it would be a bit faster I suspect since WMV encoding can be processor intensive. It depends on how heavy the number of clips or the duration.

I actually have a Dell 2.8Ghz PentiumD on a network and I often hit 100% processor usage on that.

I do use Flip4Mac and think the 640×480 output is fine though. The new Flip4Mac 2.1.0.33 is much faster than the earlier version but certainly not as fast as doing it in Windows. I use Flip4Mac in Compressor and go right back to editing in FCP while Compressor rendors.

Keep in mind there are currently some issues to WME rendering whether BootCamp or using a PC. MOV files still hit the 2GB limit! You can export out to DV or DVCPro50 AVI from FCP and you don’t have to worry about the 2GB limit BUT there’s no way to output a DVCPro100 file to AVI though!

[Craig Seeman]

I find Quicktime and Compressor make ugly MPEG4 (part 2 . . . but nice part 10 – H.264).
Cleaner and Quicktime 7.1 don’t get along and last I tested will fail on making an MPEG4
Both Squeeze and Compression Master make good MPEG4 but without processing filters, I find they look very different (both good though). Seems the default gamma is different. In both those apps you’ll get much nicer looking MPEG4 at lower data rates than Compressor/Quicktime.

[Craig Seeman]

[overeasy] “I had resisted moving this to a PC and using the Windows encoder, thinking it would be faster to stay on my Mac”

Buy a MacBook or iMac and run Parallels.

[Craig Seeman]

You may need to know what your client’s computer can handle. I’d do 2 Pass VBR and a data rate of between 2000 and 4000 kbps if his computer is reasonably fast. You could push it more if you have to but again it depends on your clients horse power.

[Craig Seeman]

What you’re describing sounds like “stair stepping”
Not being an AE person I’m not sure how you’re deinterlacing but there are many deinterlace algorithms. The stair stepping you’re seeing can very be affected by how you deinterlace. While many NLE and Compositing programs can certainly come with or can be augmented by very sophisticated deinterlace algorithms, you haven’t mentioned anything about the deinterlace settings you’ve used in AE. Did you Interpolate, Duplicate or Blend when you deinterlaced for example? Was there Edge Detection Interpolation. Did you do Adaptive deinterlace?

I think you’re better off letting a good compression app like Compression Master unless you have that kind of control in AE. You have to examine your material and make a judgement or do test encodes to determine which one works best in your circumstances.

[Brian Klein] “so I can let the compressing program do what it is meant to do. Compression”
Good compression apps do good deinterlacing. There’s good reason why compressionists consider processing filters in the compression app and why some compressionsts own more than one app.

[Craig Seeman]

Yes Compression Master is very flexible and has many deinterlace options as well as other good processing filters.

[Craig Seeman]

[Ed] “For the highest compatibility with the most people, WM9 is the way to go”

I’ll “third” your second. Many business and IT folk won’t allow Quicktime at all on their computers. WM9 is backward compatible to WMP7.1 (with the free codec update). And these days Macs with the free Flip4Mac component can play WM9 in Quicktime.