[Jeff Greenberg]

Roan “If I convert everything to 720×480 ProRes in my project I will get a better DVD output experience.”

I think there are two mistakes here:

Where you’re viewing things

What your workflow is.

First, you’re comparing the view of the QuickTime file with the final DVD. The QuickTime file does and should look better (it’s HD, and viewed at 100%) Please view your existing DVD on an actual TV set to see what the DVD looks like.

What your workflow is:
It sounds like someone said ‘make everything ProRes” to make the end product cleaner.
If you skip making the DVD from the QuickTime file and use the “Send to Compressor”, it should improve your quality.

Here’s why:
Compressor will ignore any renders, utilize FCP and render directly in the output codec. In other words, there’s only one compression pass; anything synthetic (generators, imports) are all handled uncompressed.

Here’s my guess at what is wrong.
I think you’re making DVDs by exporting a QuickTime and taking that to compressor.
In doing so, the QuickTime file is ‘flavored’ HDV – all your graphics, renders etc, are HDV. Then they’re made into an MPEG2 – that’s two compression passes – and the graphics/generators which were uncompressed were being compressed to HDV(mpeg) then AGAIN to MPEG-2 for DVD.

See if that helps.

Best,

Jeff G

[Jeff Greenberg]

Yes, you have the right idea; what you want to do is called Rotoscoping (or RotoMatting)

You’ll end up with a sandwich of video:

Original (masked)
replacement plate
Original (tracked)

You want to create a layer of her legs and animate a mask over it. Try to use a b-spline mask vs. bezier (as b-spline produces more ‘natural’ curves.) You want a few nodes to the mask and as few keyframes as possible. It’s quite a bit of work to do this sorta roto work. I try to break down the movement into discrete specific motions and keyframe those and check inbetween.

Scott Squires is one of the experts in roto work – Commotion (a dead OSX program) used to do this exact sorta thing. He has info + a podcast that never really took off, but he talks about these ideas.

Last, I’d probably do each leg separately…so you might end up with two (or more) layers above your replacement plate.

Best,

Jeff G

[Jeff Greenberg]

What version of Media Composer?

Best,

Jeff G

[Jeff Greenberg]

I’m pretty sure that compressor is going to try and make your video 16×9 or 4×3 (based on it’s encoder tab.) It’s just that Apple seems to be focused on standard HD sizes, and your size is very non standard.

I was going to suggest trying it via QuickTime, but apple removed the MPEG-2 QuickTime component from the Proapp install (you have to hunt it down from the FCS2 disks – not the FCS3 disks, as I recall.)

Try Episode Pro or Squeeze – either should do this for you.

Best,

Jeff G

[Jeff Greenberg]

What settings does the K2 Server want?

Best,

Jeff G

[Jeff Greenberg]

Aside from the excellent advice about Compressor repair, I’d also suggest the apple kb doc on compressor troubleshooting basics.

Best,

Jeff G

[Jeff Greenberg]

Elizabeth,

I watch many people fret and worry about drives. The reality is that all drives will eventually break. They write it on the side of the drive (MTBF = mean time between failure) and rate it in tens of thousands of hours.

I try to personally buy from companies like GTech and LaCie – but I’ve professionally had drives die from every manufacturer. There’s a great internal study google did that the age of the drive (24 months) for professional use.

There’s not much ‘major’ to worry about…here are the big items.

USB is the cheapest type of connect and works for most uses. Your mac also has FireWire as an option – usually drives with firewire are more expensive.
The advantage of a physically larger drive is that it’ll have its own power supply and fan.
The advantage of a physically smaller drive is that it’s more portable and likely you’re paying for that portability.

Drives have a ‘speed’ to them – faster is better, and for professional video, it’s better to have faster drives. Stuff you download from youtube for iMovie? This won’t be a factor. 4200, 5400, 7200, 10,000 are amongst some of the numbers you’ll see.

One of my favorite places to find deals on drives is dealnews

Hope that helps!

Best,

Jeff G

[Jeff Greenberg]

Craig,

Technically, a symphony does this on the fly (which is why it’s so expensive)

Software only?
Create a 1080 30i (59.97) project. Open the bin from the 23.98 project.
Dupe the sequence into a new bin.
Open the timeline and MC will auto dupe & conform it to 30i
MC will add motion adapters to every clip.
Check how things look
Output.

Best,

Jeff G

[Jeff Greenberg]

Here’s the Apple doc on dealing with compressor problems
It includes things like trashing compressor’s prefs. Let us know if it worked:
https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1888

Best,

Jeff G

[Jeff Greenberg]

Well, you’ve gone from a DV 25 master through an MPEG 2 (at 3-7mbs) and you want to go to HD?

Yeah, not much great here….I have an idea to waste a solid hour or two of your time. The video should look marginally better, but yes, it’ll still look soft.

Transcode from the VOB to an uncompressed QuickTime file (anything else and you’re involving another compression pass.)
Take the resulting QuickTime over to compressor…and try upscaling there:

ProRes 422 or ProRes LT (no point in going larger)
Have it pad the image (pillar boxing – ‘black bars’ on the sides) to minimize the upscaling.
Turn on the resize via Frame controls and use “Best (statistical prediction)” along with playing with the anti-alias and details level controls.

I’d convert 10 seconds or so, with about 10 different variance using these settings to see how far I could push the results.

If you have a budget, you might want to try downloading the trial of Instant HD from Red Giant as well.

Best,

Jeff G