[Marc Walker]

I think I erred with this…
If I view the actual amplify effect’s panel, I see the channels are linked and responsive to the left channel’s keyframes.
Final test….
Yup, I’ve increased the attenuation and it’s working on both channels.
Still, a bad design. Like most features in PP. Give me AE and a third-party audio editor any day.

[Marc Walker]

Just to let you know Matteo,
My problem does seem to be caused by this overscan thing. For the DVD menu, I can just work within the action-safe area, but as for my video where the logo is cropped in the top-left corner, I was advised here to render the video to 702×576 which resolves the problem of the cropped logo, there is still some cropping of the picture past the logo, but it is definately better and hardly noticable.

I created a test DVD so I now know the dvd picture is cropped at ~4%, which is just outside the action-safe(outer) bound. I don’t think there is any way to resolve this problem, you just have to try to work around it.

Good Luck,
Marc.

[Marc Walker]

Hi Jeff, thanks for the reply,
Yeah, I just did a g-search for calc, it’s really useful.
The HD files were FLVs originally, which were being streamed on the internet by a well-known broadcaster. They are live band performances, so I suppose they are in the middle of the ‘detail and movement scale’.

I guessed they were quite compressed after I figured the above out, I’m an audio guy, not a video guy, so I get stuck with video processing, but the FLV files looked decent enough, the only problem with quality (apart from this problem) was when I watched the DVD, I could see like pretty large sharpness-type artifacts, which disappeared when I adjusted the sharpness along with the contrast on the TV, which I didn’t really want to do as other DVDs were fine (and the artifacts aren’t there on PC), but it still looked pretty good anyway. Would turning ‘Max Depth’ on in AME help with this?

But I’m pretty happy overall with bitrate/quality ratio anyway because it’s not a professional job like. I just wish I could get a straight answer for my other DVD-related problem.

Anyway, I appreciate your insight.
Marc

[Marc Walker]

I have a similar problem.
Could it be caused by overscan? The action safe area in Encore seems to predict the picture I’m getting pretty well.

marc

[Marc Walker]

Haha, I just posted a very similar question. I started it earlier, so I didn’t see yours at the time.

[Marc Walker]

It was pretty obvious really, I wasn’t paying enough attention to the information in front of me (I was pretty tired at the time).
The HD files are AVC/AAC streams, with an average total bitrate of 5,066kbps.

As it turned out, the settings I was using in AME (min: 2.8, Target: 5, Max: 7) Created a video file with a very similar bitrate (5Mbps or 5,000kbps).

What confused me was how a HD format and a SD format could be so similar in size, but not in quality, but there it is. They were. I think this is because the AVC/H.264 compression has a better result than MPEG2.

Further:
When I played around with the MPEG2-DVD settings, I found that I could lower the target bitrate to 3 or even 2Mbps, and with 2-pass and max render quality enabled, there was very little noticeable degradation.

To help me further refine my bitrate settings, I searched for a tool to help me figure out the optimum bitrate to get decent quality while bit-budgeting for DVD. I have 8 HD files at 55mins to 1½hrs each, and I don’t want to use 8 discs.
I found a very detailed and easy-to-use bit-budgeting calculator, which helped my fit two files onto each disc with optimal settings.

[Marc Walker]

I don’t need an answer now, so how do I delete this question?

[Marc Walker]

No, I don’t have any keyframes on that property.

I’ll try to show you exactly what I’m trying to do, maybe that will help you to help me.
This is my comp:
This shape image turns on two axes(TIFF seq), and the lights follow the “points” of the shape in 3D(extracted from Cinema4D):

I use the light points as markers for lightening strike points(`Direction` property).

As you can see in the above image, In order for the lightening to strike the light points, I added two effects (`Pos X Offst` of 640px and `Pos Y Offst` of 360px) and also applied to the `Direction` property, the expression
thisComp.layer("Pos. Light.1").toComp([0,0,0]);

So we get to now… and all I want is for the lightening not to strike the light point if the light point passes the halfway point of the screen in either dimension, but instead, to switch to another light point. This is as far as I got because of the problem in the OP. I was going to add more code to the expression so that the lightening will eventually strike the closest light point (within tolerance).

I hope this has explained a bit more for you and not confused you instead!

Thanks

[Marc Walker]

Hi Dan,
It’s strange (to me) because if value was (716, 384) say, the if statement seems to work at first (when I click out of expression box), but then it doesn’t change over time, it just stays the same when value[0] passes around 640.

It’s like it doesn’t run the if statement for each frame basically. I haven’t read anywhere that this is the correct behavior for value. Is it? and if so, what could I use instead of value[0]?

Thanks

[Marc Walker]

Thanks Kalle, been waiting for that answer for days!

I thought there must be a simple expression for it, but I didn’t know what I was looking for.

Thanks again.