[Daniel Low]

Arty is working with FCP – a Mac only product, as such I’ve assumed that he’s working on a Mac.

While you obviously lose quality everytime you (re-)compress, Arty is working with (heavily compressed) HDV material, in this case probably at 19.7Mbit/s (720p). Exporting to uncompressed or Animation rockets that datarate upto around 848Mbit/s (8 bit).
It’s also a very slow process.
Obviously working with that uncompressed material in realtime would be much much harder (if at all possible) and any transcoding from it will required much more resource.

Maybe your definition of ‘uncompressed’ is different from mine?

PhotoJPEG at 75% (or above) is as good as anybody would need in this instance.

Episode is more professional simply because of the range of formats and codecs it supports as well as some very sophisticated and high quality pre-processing, Squeeze doesn’t come close with its preprocessing options. Episode also has the option of Episode Engine which takes it firmly into the enterprise space.
I’ve used pretty well all the transcoding applications out there and Episode is up there with the best. Squeeze is prefect for those who only work with a small handful of formats and don’t necessarly want or need to get their hands ‘under the bonnet’.

[Daniel Low]

So you have a 16:9 clip and you want to make it a 4:3 clip, with no distortion?

Simple: Apply a 4:3 crop on the 16:9 clip and resize to 320×240 or another 4:3 frame size.

[Daniel Low]

No point using an uncompressed codec if the source was compressed – best bet is to match the source codec as closely as possible. Using the Animation codec is just a huge waste of resources (time and drive space) unless your source is uncompressed Animation type material.
A great intermediate codec is PhotoJPEG with the quality slider at 75%

Squeeze is not capable of trancoding material while adding letterboxing. More professional applications like Episode from Telestream are capable of this. You’ll probably find that Episode doesn’t have any of the problems display exported video like Squeeze does.

[Daniel Low]

MPEG-2 will display blacks as grey on a PC monitor, but on a TV they should look black. PC’s (which use RGB) can display 0-255 grey values, a broadcast format like MPEG-2 is limited to 16-235. Quicktime codecs like MPEG-4 will behave differently, as you have found.
MPEG-2 conforms to CCIR 601 – more here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCIR_601
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model

Increasing datarate may not necessarly increase quality, try using 2-pass and/or VBR.

The same can be said of keyframes – increasing the number of keyframes can actually hurt the quality, besides, MPEG-2 does not use keyframes but rather GOPs – Groups Of Pictures.

You may want to look at a more professional transcoding package than Squeeze, have a look a Procoder from Grass Valley, it will most certainly give you better quality output.

[Daniel Low]

I wouldn’t bother. Cleaner is one of the slowest MPEG encoders in the known universe.

What advanced options do you need, or were thinking of using?

[Daniel Low]

Here’s a great resource for CODEC info.

https://codecs.onerivermedia.com/

[Daniel Low]

Did you have a unique or hardware based QT codec on the PC?

[Daniel Low]

Your workflow seems a little crazy.

Why bother with AVI? Why bother going over to Virtualdub.Infact why bother with the PC?
There are a number of Quicktime CODECs that would give you no loss in quality. AVI files are a pain to work with especially cross platform.

Check out the 4:4:4 CODECs listed here:
https://codecs.onerivermedia.com/

[Daniel Low]

Great post.

Thanks.

[Daniel Low]

Can we assume you’ve done all the usualy maintainance stuff like repairing permissions etc?

If so then I’d suggest a re-install.