[Marissa Gouverne]

You guys aren’t kidding, the results haven’t been getting much better. Unfortunately I’m also limited to using one DVD for the whole film–we do have 240 minute capacity DVDs, but that’s a bit like adding whipped cream to a puddle of ice cream, isn’t it.

I did another export with Compressor, thinking maybe that leaving the settings to the default was making it encode to 29.97fps, but changing the settings manually didn’t help either, unfortunately. I have a feeling that’s what’s causing the noise. We’re at the deadline, so the best copy I have is actually one that I made by exporting from Avid with the setting “Sorenson Squeeze-encode to DVD”, and then letting Toast encode with custom settings where I increased the average bitrate to about 7mb/s (got your message after I had left the office, Shane!). It’s still a not great, but it’s definitely watchable.

I’m going to try more of your suggestions next time we need to burn off a DVD–thanks so much for everyone’s input! I’ll be sure to update if I find anything else out.

[Marissa Gouverne]

Well, when I AMA link the MXF file in Avid, the resolution says J2K 1080p 23.976–does that answer your question?

Do you just use the standard settings in compressor, or do you change the bitrate? I’m considering doing one more output and increasing the bitrate, but I’m wondering how that could blow up in my face…Do you know anything about bitrate limits or such?

[Marissa Gouverne]

Oh sure, but even so it looked really terrible compared to other DVDs–noise all around the simple text and the like.

Squeeze doesn’t, I don’t think. Maybe I’m confused here as well, because I’m trying to use the Sorenson Squeeze option out of Avid, which I just ran a test on and apparently doesn’t make an mpeg-2 file? Which means that toast would just reencode and that just puts me right back at square one…

I like toast a lot for authoring but I’m stuck at the encoding phase. Am I just out of luck here with the tools that I have?

[Marissa Gouverne]

Might have to. That’s not what my archival team wants because that can get pretty clunky when they’re trying to order masters (i.e. if the audio of a clip extends past the length of the video), but it’s not looking like there’s a decent alternative while the timeline is kind of a mess and EDL Manager is being this difficult. I’ll work it out today and see if that’ll solve the problem, however.
Thanks everyone!

[Marissa Gouverne]

Oy vey!

But thank you so much, your info has been incredibly helpful and now I think I’ve got it.

All the best to you!
MG

[Marissa Gouverne]

Hey Shane!

Thanks so much for responding! This really helps a lot. I have a few more questions for you–

1. You got it–a lot of them are SD letterboxed. Is there a way to capture the footage so that it isn’t letterboxed? Would that simply require digging up the originals?

2-3. Avid doesn’t seem to have project settings for NTSC 29.97–only 30i NTSC. Should I capture in a 30i NTSC project, then? Or would it be better to get kind of close with 29.97 720p project?

4. The connection is indeed firewire, though it’s firewire to a thunderbolt adaptor. Does that change anything?

2(B). Yeah, I am finding it difficult to get these miniDV cassettes to play on this deck, but I do get an error message with these supposed HDV tapes that says “ADM_DIO_ERROR_OCCURRED, DIOerr: Expected DV25 NTSC but received DVCPRO HD1080/59.94”. That’s when I’m in the NTSC 30i project, so I suppose there’s my answer as far as the mini tapes go. But you’re saying this HD1200A deck won’t work with HDV? It does say on the hardware “DVCPRO HD”, so I assumed it would.

And thank you so, so much for your thoughtful response, it’s helping my situation so much here!
MG

[Marissa Gouverne]

Well this is all good news.
Additional question–what if we’re using the mentioned OS’s but also different versions of Avid? Meaning the 10.9.5 is on MC 7.0.4.4 but the OS 10.10.3 is on MC 7.0.6 (or whatever the latest 7 is)?

[Marissa Gouverne]

Ah, right. I thought it might be an industry standard term so I thought I’d ask. Turns out even the director is kind of fuzzy on what they wanted so we’re just giving them everything–thanks anyways!

[Marissa Gouverne]

Well, here’s a wrench in the matter too–

The latest of the C300 plugins (v.3) is only available for Avid 8.4 and up. Given that this is one of the newest C300 models, I’m led to believe that this version might be required to link. The problem is I can’t just update my Avid because we still need MC 7 in order to work with scriptsync, which was discontinued in 8.

Any creative solutions?

[Marissa Gouverne]

Thanks for the input, Shane!