[Kris Merkel]

You are only giving us half the picture (sorry, couldn’t help myself) You have the sequence setting in the pic, but what we need to see along with this is your clip settings and your RT playback menu. We can then help diagnose your issues.

BTW. DVD best quality/ fastest settings or any other preset in compressor are just starting points for encoding to various formats. You invariably will have to tweak settings in order to massage the video till you get an optimal image. Do the presets look good? Most of the time. Can you do better? Always

I would like to see your clip settings from the browser and your RT menu.

[Kris Merkel]

Export your text sample as current settings. Open in Compresor and apply your mpg2 settings.

your encoder settings should look something like this

and your frame controls should look something like this

be advised, with similar settings you will be looking at extremely long compression times, but the quality will be much better than what you have been getting.

You will have to adjust your settings accordingly. I would sugest using a 10, 15, 20, or 30 sec clip so you can measure how long the actual encoding time will take.

good luck

[Kris Merkel]

I’ve ben trying to avoid the worst case scenario. I’ve been having problems with compressor since we upgraded as well. We had a VAR do our upgrade and it looks like we are in for a support call.

[Kris Merkel]

The first frames of the clips are all fine. After reassigning poster frames the thumbs are still look skewed.

I’ve looked at all the thumbs since we upgraded our system and every HDV to ProRes thumb looks like this.

[Kris Merkel]

Try moving your GFX in to Motion or AE. Make your moves there and export the comp with the animation codec. Then import into FCP and see if the problem persists.

[Kris Merkel]

Have you referenced your original clips to see if the problem is on the tape? Or, tried to recapture after double checking your settings?

[Kris Merkel]

Thanks Tim,

I just needed your font specs. I have 2 tight deadlines this morning and an edit with a client later. I will try to squeeze something out this afternoon. In the meantime you should experiment with some other colors and try to smooth the edges of your font and shadow.

If I remember correctly, from reading Ben Waggoner’s book on compression. Hard straight edges are a difficult to compress.

Is the text moving?

Also this now might be a better time to move this thread over to the compression forum since it now is out of the realm of FCP.

[Kris Merkel]

What font are you using?

Open the sample in QT and then reduce(scale) the size of the window to the minimum amount 478×269.

Do you see anything wrong with the text. This is essentially what is happening to your file, except on a much simpler level, when you run it through compressor.

You can get it to look a little better, but, some things just do not compress well. Like red text with a thin sharp shadow over black.

I am going to see if i can get you a cleaner output but I will need your specs.

[Kris Merkel]

Tim,

yes send a sample. I’d like to see it.

kmerkel(at)imeast(dot)net

[Kris Merkel]

As I continued reading further down the thread I started thinking to myself this has got to be a joke. We’ve all had our learning curves regarding compression. And especially compressing TXT. For anyone who remembers compressing with Cleaner and spending loads of time massaging clips to get an MPEG1 file to look like the original video, this has to be somewhat amusing. Now days the compression algorithms are, for the most part, decent. And if you throw good video into a compression utility you will get good video out.

I couldn’t believe that the OP was having such a difficult time with this so I decided I would quickly attempt to recreate his problem.

I started with his first step. Titles created in Illustrator.

Now from the get go his dimensions of 1280×1080 did not make sense. I know that the DVCProHD 30p is 1280×1080 but needs to be viewed anamorphic. I have never delivered anything with this frame size.

OK, I opened Illustrator and created a new document and attempted to find the 1280×1080 DVCPro HD setting. I found out that it’s not there.

Back to the steps in a second. Now in FCP the HD 1280×1080 sequence frame size exists but needs to be set to anamorphic in order to be viewed correctly.

What I would do is:

1.create a new 1920×1080 AI file, Cut and Past your content from the 1280×1080 and adjust accordingly and save to your PNG

2. create a new Motion Project with 1920×1080 settings 10 sec long. Place your PNG file in the comp and adjust accordingly.

3. Export your motion file with the Animation codec set to RGB+Alpha

4. Use this file to test your compressor settings. When you get something that looks great (and you will)make a preset.

5. Import the animation file into FCP, Render and Export with same a seq settings.

6.Compress a small section of this file with video and GFX using your preset. Adjust your preset as necessary to obtain optimal quality. Keeping in mind your bitrate limitations for your entire program.

You should have positive results. As far as the pulsing goes, you said this was on a static shot with moving foliage. This locked down shot is probably one of the most difficult for compressor to squeeze because of the foliage. My guess is that in 2pass VBR this info is overloading the Codec.

Take what you are doing in small steps and you will find the suite spots in your compression pass.

You can also check in the Compression Techniques forum for more help

Finally I agree with Michael. BitVice is a very good at what it does and you should try out a demo.