[Jaap Verdenius]

Deinterlacing will remove one field and duplicate the other.

[Jaap Verdenius]

Remove all letterboxing in the sequence, set your sequence to 16:9 and then scale up all 4:3 clips to 133% in their motion tabs.

[Jaap Verdenius]

For the silhouette, empty the background, render the alpha channel of your render and transfer it to RGB.
You can render alpha in Maya – not sure if you can do it in Poser, but you can always import your Poser model as an obj file into Maya.

[Jaap Verdenius]

Maybe I did not understand everything you wrote.
You are working in FCP, is that right? So you can export your reel sequence to a QT movie with current (the same) settings. And you could use that .mov not only in DVDSP but also in iDVD, right?

So, in what codec is your source material, DV NTSC? It should not get worse from exporting it to a Quicktime movie with the same settings. Does it look bad in Quicktime Player? Perhaps QTPlayer is fooling you because it is set to playback DV clips at half quality (look in the preferences). How does the exported movie look when you reimport it into FCP and compare it there?

And I have no idea about iDVD’s quality – but DVDSP is part of FinalCutStudio2 so as you seem to have FCP, DVDSP should be within your reach…

[Jaap Verdenius]

Tomas,

If you want to burn to dvd you need to encode to MPEG-2 and Compressor is the way to go. There are folders with settings in Compressor (from fastest encode to best quality) to export to a MPEG-2 file (.m2v video) and an AC3 file (audio) which you can then import into DVD Studio Pro. These settings are presets and should work fine. Possibly you cannot open the MPEG file directly but in DVD Studio Pro you can.

Alternatively, you can also skip Compressor and leave the encoding to DVDSP. For this you should select your timeline in FCP and do File>Export Quicktime Movie… In the Settings, select “Current Settings and deselect “make selfcontained”. This will give you a reference movie that you can import into DVDSP. The encoding settings can be found in DVDSP’s Preferences.

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

Where are you comparing, in Quicktime Player? Then you have to select High Quality playback in the preferences, otherwise it will not play DV files at their full quality.

If that is not the problem, then reimport the file to FCP and compare to the original. If you did the export the right way you should not see significant differences – unless you have some serious color correction going on.

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

Hmm…

And what happens if you do Export using Compressor (I guess Compressor should also be able to handle your 5:1 codec)? Does that get you around the problem?

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

Dorit,

1. The interlace artefact: Already tried to deinterlace the inherited stuff (Effects>Video>Deinterlace)?
2. The photo dissolves: Is your timeline video playback setting set to dynamic? Then set it to full. Is there a green/orange line? Render it. If still not good, try the workaround: put one photo one track above the other, create an overlap and keyframe its opacity.

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

Hi Vicky,

Is it possible that you left and In and/or an Out point in the sequence?
If yes, that would explain it.

Jaap

[Jaap Verdenius]

You’d better do it in Color, but there’s a quick way in FCP:

– apply a 3-way Color Correction Filter to the clip and open its controls
– in the Filter’s visual Settings, twirl down Limit Effect (at the bottom)
– select your grey with the eyedropper
– select the key below the eyedropper – this gives you a matte in the Canvas
– tweak it with all the hue/luma/sat settings and soften it
– click the eyedropper twice to get back from matte to final
– do your desaturation, etc

By the way, if the differences between those greys are caused by lighting differences or improper white balancing then you are actually better off with match hue controls (which you can also find in the 3-way correction filter).

Jaap