[Craig Seeman]

Are you delivering to a specific station or to several stations but only one is showing this issue?

You state poor results at “some” stations. Have you been able to view the same spot airing at two different stations.

If one station is good and the other isn’t then I’d believe the issue is “station side.”

I’ve delivered 0 black to DropBox and seen spots play on two stations and they looked identical (booth good) . . . this even though their specs say that you should add 7.5 black on your end. I may have raised black a smidgen (technical measurement of course) above 0 thinking that might “trigger” something.

[Craig Seeman]

I was kinda surprised when you originally said you could do it with Cleaner. I would strongly recommend anyone to switch from Cleaner to something else as soon as the need arises.

BTW if you’re doing Program Streams, the basic version of Episode at $395 will work. There was a time they were running a cross grade sale which had a significant discount for Cleaner owners too. I think that sale has ended though.

[Craig Seeman]

You can always embed a player on your website yourself.

https://flowplayer.org/

https://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player

[Craig Seeman]

See this on page 151 of the Compressor 3 PDF user manual

If your source video is letterboxed, use the aspect ratio that matches the
whole video frame, including the black bars, or else you will end up with distorted
output files. You can use the automatic crop feature to crop off the letterbox bars. See
Chapter 21,

[Craig Seeman]

What format was it shot on and were you given that source file or when that was further compressed?

What was your data rate?

What software are you using to compress it so we might make specific suggestions?

Was this shot with a pro mist filter or equivalent? It has that Barbara Walters look if you know what a mean.

[Craig Seeman]

Can you post the settings? It might help other folks here using Cleaner and DGFastchannel

[Craig Seeman]

Looks like you have a mix of DGFastchannel and Pathfire specs.
DG (for spots) has been 720×480
Pathfire (for VNR) is 720×512

I’m a DG user. I use Episode Pro to encode. If you had Episode Pro I can email you a preset.
I have Cleaner 6.5.1 too but I’ve never used it for DGFastchannel so I can have a look at that but I can’t guarentee anything. My Episode Pro settings have passed DG certification though.

[Craig Seeman]

They had two at HD World. They wouldn’t let them leave the tripods though. I tested such things as Expanded Focus and Peaking and was very impressed. I also played with the ability to rack focus by hand and stored setting. I was impressed by the ability to “variably pad” the audio ins (rather than just a 10 db pad). I had a lot of workflow questions that were answered (and some they couldn’t answer definitively).

As someone who was looking at the HVX200 when it came out and eventually decided against it for many reasons, I have far fewer reservations about the EX1.

I think backing up EX1’s .mp4 to Blu-Ray will be much more practical (IMHO) than P2.
P2 is a folder full of things that can “go wrong” IMHO.

There are far fewer times one would have to back up in the field if you need to go that rouge given XDCAM’s lower data rate GOP structure and, thus, longer record times on the cards.

Having the option to go to XDCAM disc will be good too for certain projects (although I’m hoping the discs will support 1920×1080 at some point).

A couple of “odd” things about the camera was that Sony couldn’t say what would work with their “unique” lens control port. You’d think they’d be coming out with something for that.

The other is the 77mm thread for the lens but they’ll be adaptors for that for sure.

[Craig Seeman]

GOP issues can be a strange thing. Predictive and BiDirectional frames looking for things and making determinations about what’s happening in a given frame.

Personally I’m always a bit uneasy about going from a GOP based source to and encode with a new GOP structure. Of course that’s why features like compression markers are there.

It would be an interesting test with this given sequence to render to a non GOP (all I frame) codec and then render that to the appropriate MPEG2 file for the DVD.

[Craig Seeman]

Try using compression markers in front of the tough areas. Just encode a couple of minutes around the tough area as a test. You may decide you need to space a couple of compression markers.