[Jeff Brown]

What kind of 720P AVI? HDV, uncompressed, etc.
What are the project settings?

I’m guessing you don’t have enough disk throughput. Full, uncompressed 720P needs a minimum of 110 MBytes per second.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Yes, what Eddie said…
Due to some odd history of TV technology, drop-frame is needed so the frame numbers match real time. Otherwise, “video time” would be “off” about 2 seconds per hour, which is not good for broadcast scheduling.

It’s disconcerting when you first see it, though!

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

OK, sorry. Good question, dumb answer.
I probably would have sent a 720×480 animation or PNG QuickTime to iDVD, to avoid having to scale it in the authoring proggy, but your approach is certainly valid.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Yes, the “80” refers to 80% luminance. The RGB values for this are (255*0.8) = 204,204,204.

Proper font selection would eliminate the need to blur text. Avoid fine lines & thin serifs. A bit of drop shadow will help text stand up to NTSC playback.

hope it helps,
Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

If you are producing a video-DVD, the ONLY choice for video compression is MPEG2*. If you are producing widescreen, the image will still be 720×480 (again, the only choice for video-DVD), but with a widescreen (1.2 pixel aspect) flag set, so playback hardware will display as 16:9.

Test through the entire chain; i.e., play back your finished DVD on a DVD set-top player.

Hope it helps,
Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

The PNG codec is also lossless at 100% quality, but is compressed (compared to Animation), and typically saves some space. The Yuv codecs should be a bit smaller than Animation, as I think they are 4:2:2, hence throw away 1/2 the color resolution. However: digiBeta uses 10-bit 4:2:2 for recording, so that is the best “match” for your output. You could also use whatever (proprietary) codec they might be using with the video I/O hardware (AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, etc.).
I’d do a clip test (include a bit of bars and other test patterns) with the facility with proprietary, Yuv 10-bit and PNG to compare file sizes, import ease, and check for gamma/level issues.

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Hi Ashley,
My suggestion:
You should work as uncompressed as possible throughout the entire process. You may be capturing in DV, that’s fine. But after the capture, your AE<-->PPro work should be one of the following:
AVI uncompressed
QTime animation codec (100% quality)
QTime PNG codec (100% quality)
File sequence (TGA, PNG, TIF; not JPG)

Your final master output should also be one of the above. You then encode your master to whatever you need: AVI, Flash, tiny QTime, WMV. You then always have a master of the highest quality to go back to in the future.

Yes, this will take lots more HD space. But these days, HD space is a lot cheaper than your time.

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

It would be worth double-checking that you do not have “noise reduction” turned on as a filter in Media Encoder. It kills rendering time.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Yes, keep in mind the SDX 900 shoots 50 Mbps DVCPro. 50 mega-bits per second yields about 6.25 megaBytes per second (375 MB/minute), so you’ll probably want to compress before posting to the web…
It can produce really nice SD, though.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

[xaris papadoupoulos] “f i got it rigth u whant me to scale down 1700 jpeg’s manualy down?”

Photoshop -> File -> Automate -> Batch
Should take you about 15 minutes to set up, and about 15-30 minutes to process the files. OK, the first time will take you twice as long, but then you will know how, so the next time: easy!

-Jeff