[David Donnenfield]

Well, the alternative is to just enter the Premiere environment. Right? As I understand it, you can load just about any format onto a Premiere timeline and it just accepts it. Do I have that right?
David

[David Donnenfield]

Marcus,
I’m glad you picked up on that old thread. I’m faced with a multiple format, CODEC, etc. situation now. None of the other posts appealed to me as much as your solution. I just may give yours a shot. It’s either that or throwing everything into Premiere which, I understand, will digest anything on one timeline. So, many thanks for continuing this old but still relevant discussion.
Happy New Year.
David

[David Donnenfield]

Well, I went ahead and exported the 16:9 “cropped” movie in DV codec, put it in a FCP sequence that I had to render, exported to Compressor with the FixExporter Flash Encoder, and got an Error #60003 message: Couldn’t get string from resource. Rather cryptic, and disappointing. Besides contacting On2 Technologies, any idea on what to try next?
David

[David Donnenfield]

Daniel,
This is great information and adds to my understanding. I have already standardized to 640×480 and have gotten several of the wmv files to convert now. But, I am left with one last nagging wmv movie that was shot 16:9 (640×360). so it needs to be cropped as well as converted to flv. The flv conversion I think I’m getting a handle on with my DV settings, but it’s the aspect change that has got me wondering. I tried it once, when I was using the Animation codec and the image came out 640×480, but squished in from the sides. So, clearly, I must change some settings governing the image size when I re-export out of QT Pro. But, it’s confusing.

Within QT Pro, I’m presented with the choice of Preserving the aspect ratio or Not Preserving it. I would have thought that I don’t want to preserve the aspect ratio since I’ve already selected the image dimension as 640×480.
But if I do select Preserve aspect ratio, I’m given the alluring options of:
Letter box
Crop
Fit within dimension

Do I want to “Crop” and preserve the 16:9 (640×360) aspect ratio? I tried it once, and got the “squished” image — 4:3, but pushed in from the sides. Will changing to the DV/DVPro VGA settings with square pixels solve the problem automatically? Just one too many variables to know how to proceed.
Thanks,
David

[David Donnenfield]

Daniel,
Before I reply to your specific settings request, let me say that after hours and hours of angst and trying different combinations, I got the dang thing to come our decently by re-exporting via QT Pro using the DV/DVPro setting. I also checked “Progressive”, dialed the quality setting to “Best” and formatted as a 4:3 VGA output (it’s ultimately going to computer display). The outcome lopped 50MB off the file size from the Animation codec QTs that I was making. But, what’s more important is that the sucker played without nasty pixelation and motion stutters.

This begs the next question: Was the animation codec just too high a data interpolation for the Flash encoder to handle? Or was it that the DV setting more closely matched the source material from which the wmv file was made? Maybe there are other possibilities, but these are the questions that come to mind for me in getting to the bottom of this particular compression conundrum.

Settings:

What frame size are the source WMVs? 640×480

What datarate are the source WMVs? 2600kbps

What method did you use to go from 16:9 to 4:3 This particular movie was already 4:3, so I didn’t have to change the aspect. But the next one I will, it’s already exported “squished” (from the sides) using the Animation codec so I’ve got a problem looming.

What frame size are your output FLVs 640×480

What keyframe settings are you using for the FLV? 60 keyframes

[David Donnenfield]

That’s exactly what I just discovered when I played the test file back on my laptap. Therefore, the project moves forward. Thanks for all of your information, it completely confirms my experience.
David

[David Donnenfield]

Well, encoding the Flash file using “uncompressed” reduced the level of flanging-sibilance, but did not eliminate it. One last test then to see if 48KB at 24 bit helps. If not, then I have to speak with the client about this job.
David

[David Donnenfield]

Actually, I have another idea I’m going to pursue first, which is to go with “uncompressed” audio in the Flash file compression. I’m not really limited in my playback data rate, so maybe indulging in this luxury with the audio will minimize the problem. I’ll let you know.
David

[David Donnenfield]

Thanks for your help, Steven. After some amount of gnashing of teeth and yanking of hair, I got to the bottom of the problem. And it’s probably related to what you suggested.
I couldn’t really check if it was re-exporting the wmv files at 2997 and
dropping into an appropriately tweaked sequence was it. Or, if it was
putting the media on my array instead of accidentally playing it from an
internal drive. Or, if it was the last thing that I changed (and it very
well may have been this) changing the video play back from Kona 525i 23.98
8bit to Kona 525i 29.97 bit. But, now after almost a full day of working on
this, the sequences play in FCP. Hallelujah!
Let’s hope it’s smooth sailing from here.
David

[David Donnenfield]

In some sense are you saying I could have bypassed this PreSonus A to D converter altogether? I have a Mackie 1402. Could I have routed the output of the Mackie into the Aja patch bay and captured directly into the computer using FC’s Voice Over function? If so, I’m sorry that I never thought of that?