[Craig Seeman]

32 bit should work. Hmmm.

[Craig Seeman]

In the past I’ve seen this issue when the computer screen wasn’t set to millions of colors. See if you can change the screens to millions of colors on the PCs where you’re seeing the issue.

[Craig Seeman]

You really need to have a business plan first. You need to know what your target market is before purchasing any gear.

How do you expect to deliver HD to your clients for example?
WHO do you want to target as clients?

Do you plan to do corporate marketing? seminars? weddings? local cable spots? indy features? Docs for broadcast? niche markets of some sort?

Only YOU can answer the above and if you say all of the above you either need an assured client base or your tanked by buying gear that will get little use.

Given your possible targets, HOW are you going to market to them so they know you exist?

[Craig Seeman]

If the offset is consistent you can adjust the Compressor processing filters and save them as a custom preset.

BTW if you do an encodes (in some codecs, I haven’t tried them all) with exact same settings on PPC and Intel using Quicktime Pro (for example) they will look different! I believe this was reported on MacFixit and of course I’ve seen it myself.

[Craig Seeman]

Episode does a very good job creating WMV files but running WME on an Intel Mac (Bootcamp or Parallel) is basically a Windows box (which is why bootcamp works). It would be interesting to see if one could run WME in “Crossover” though.

[Craig Seeman]

You can export to DV AVI from FCP or Quicktime Pro. Set Export Movie to AVI, click on options, set video to DV/DVCPRO NTSC (or DV PAL), set audio to uncompressed 48kHz, 16 bit, stereo. Quicktime also has Export to DV Stream (use options to set format particulars).

[Craig Seeman]

Perian works with FLV but not with swf.
SWF can play directly in a browser with the swf plugin but that doesn’t help if you want to convert it to .mov.

[Craig Seeman]

Set your KeyFrame rate to every 1 second. That works in 2.1.2

They’re still working on improviing it so keyframe rate won’t have impact on color shift at all.

[Craig Seeman]

With the free Perian plugin installed you can play FLV8 in Quicktime. With QuicktimePro you may be able to export this to the .mov codec of your choice but I haven’t tried that yet.

[Craig Seeman]

Burned (as opposed to replicated) DVDs can run in to some compatibility problems with various players. When I do a burn I test with two consumer DVD players. Older players and some brands are prone to problems with burned DVDs and some may not like certain brands of media. Some don’t like high data rate peaks either.

I use Verbatim Hub Printable. I burn at 4x. I keep the peaks down to 6.5 (VERY CONSERVATIVE). Using AC3 audio provides more room to increase the video data rate. Actual data rate depends on how much you’re putting on that disc but limiting the peaks is key.

Even with all that some older players just don’t like DVD-R or DVD+R. As I said I test on two different consumer players so if it’s working on those the issue may very well be their player.

I’ve seen compatiblily rates reported at about 95%-98% for burned DVDs. Replicated is at 100%.

Don’t forget discs themselves can get dirty (dust, fingerprints) and dirt can certainly get on the playback laser. In other words I’d tell the client to try on another player (I recommend the 2 brands I test with – Sony and Samsung) before they blame your discs/burns.