[Craig Seeman]

[Arlin Golden] “There are unpixelated commercial DVDs all over the place!”

Likely not done in Compressor. I suspect Compressor 4.1 is improved. There was a high end plugin for MPEG2 encoder for Compressor that I thought was killed some time back.

CinemaCraft
https://cinemacraft.visiblelight.com/cinema-craft-encoder-MP

It does list Compressor 3, 3.5, 5 but seems to stop at OS 10.7. It’s listed as “out of stock”

$990
https://www.visiblelight.com/cinema-craft-encoder-mp-for-mac.html

[Craig Seeman]

Compatibility depends on the quality of the DVD Player. for that reason many compressionists will keep the data rate to 6.5mbps even though the spec allows a higher data rate.

BTW there was an issue with some version of Compressor 3.x where VBR encoding resulting in pixelation. CBR set to 6 or 6.5mbps would be worth a try.

If there’s a particularly bad section with fast action, adding a Compression Marker can help as that resets the KeyFrame for the GOP where the P and B frames draw their information from.

[Craig Seeman]

CoreMelt has a tutorial posted which shows use with various grading plugins as well as how to modify and public an effect from Motion.

https://vimeo.com/124020187

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[Craig Seeman]

[Arlin Golden] “We were all watching DVDs for years before bluray and hd streaming hit the scene, and criterion was putting HD trasnfers onto DVDs (and still continues to do so) without any pixelation.”

If you’re talking about commercial DVDs they’re using very high end down scalers. Down scaling can be problem.

[Arlin Golden] “Is there a better way to down convert to SD? right now I just take an apple prores hq master file and compress that directly to mpeg-2.”

In Compressor you may want to job chain and do a separate downscale. In fact you may want to do the downscale separately and check that you’re happy with the quality first.

[Arlin Golden] “I dont understand you question about keyframes and iframes, but I can tell you the pixellation occurs in the video whenever theres a lot of motion going on; big blocky pixels. “

Not enough data for the motion. Perhaps it’s a VBR peak setting. Transitions (dissolves for example) are considered extremely fast motion since every frame has changing information.

[Arlin Golden] “I actually just tried the trial version of episode today to see how it performed and i saw no change in video quality.”

All programs require user input for best quality. You have to test and tweak settings over the most difficult regions.

[Craig Seeman]

[Adam Bulley] “as part of a DVD-Rom”

The settings depend on how big the “part” is.
Duration times bit rate generally equals file size. You haven’t provided any information for anyone to suggest in that framework.

Generally for best looking file I’d recommend encoding x264 .mp4 with CABAC Entropy and High Profile and doing multipass can helps as well.

[Craig Seeman]

Keep in mind that DVD players have a limit to the data rate they can handle so pushing to “fill the disk” may not make for a playable DVD. You can try putting keyframes in front of transitions since that creates an i-frame… but you make no mention where the pixilation occurs. Trouble shooting suggestions are only as accurate as the information you provide. Perhaps your issue is down converting HD to Standard Def DVD but again, no information provided. The other possibility is that there are better encoders now. I wouldn’t be surprised if Compressor 4.1 could do a better job. You may want to look at Telestream Episode or Sorenson Squeeze.

[Craig Seeman]

Seeing it to. Apparently added with yesterday’s (20 April) CoreMelt SliceX update. Looking forward to seeing how well the integration works. Tracking Mattes for Color Grading in FCPX would be huge.

[Craig Seeman]

I think the key difference between Apple’s UI and others is that it’s designed to be easily manageable on a 15″ Retina or a single screen iMac.

Other interfaces allow you to have lots of things open whereas Apple is geared towards single screen. Probably one of the bigger limitations in in FCPX is what you can put on a second monitor.

For some, it can get tiring opening and closing windows. It would be nice to keep the main monitor for Viewer(s) and Timeline and the second monitor for everything else such as Browser, Scopes, Inspector, FX Browsers, all open and just keystroke to the window you want to use.

Resolve handles this by having separate work spaces for editing, grading, export. FCPX handles it by having windows open and close as needed.

[Craig Seeman]

Also 30 years plus as an editor and with NLEs dating back to CMX6000.

I like the way various windows open and close as needed. I do wish I could move them to other places. I’d like my Scopes, Time Line Index, FX to open where the Inspector is a times so my timeline doesn’t get shoved left and right. I’d like the Viewer to be locked to a size without getting shoved around by opening and closing windows. There’s so much space for user created buttons next to the time display.

I don’t find anything Fisher Price about it even given the limitations on customization. I much prefer the minimalist look of things, the contextual opening and closing of things. I think, very fundamentally, Apple design ethic in all their hardware and software is to tend towards minimalism so that’s not going to change any time soon. As they add more, they’ll be done contextual. They are very much the opposite of window/palate happy Adobe.

[Craig Seeman]

[David Berez] “- The cartoonish icons for the effects and transitions.”

Yet this is one of the things I like about the interface. No doubt a Ubillos thing going back to his work on Premiere. I hate having to decipher cryptic and often conflicting names of FX and Transitions from different developers. I like seeing the visual representation and I love being able to preview the effect rather than the endless add followed by delete I had to do with other NLEs.

[David Berez] “- And the waveforms . . . ugh! Cartoonish.”

I guess the folks at Blackmagic would disagree since they use the same representation in Resolve.
I like that they’re dynamically interactive to applied audio FX.

And, if at any given point they are a bother, you can disable them whether in Browser or Timeline.