[Mark Mcfarlane]

The XH A1 does in fact have controls for compressing or expanding both highlights and blacks. You can use these controls to somewhat compress (or expand) the dynamic range of the captured image.

A graduated neutral density filter can help, but I prefer them for landscapes without people or buildings. I can (usually) tell when one is used, but sometimes it’s all you can do.

If the subject’s head is in front of the sky (in the dark side of the filter) and the body is below the horizon (in the clear side of the filter), you will see the gradation in exposure accross the subject, which is annoying as heck.

Mark
Novice

[Mark Mcfarlane]

Just a thought: Have you tried burning to a different brand/batch of media? It s possible that you have a batch of marginal DVDs that will only play on the drive you burnt them from.

Also, have you tried burning the DVD on a different DVD burner?

It is possible, from what you have explained, that your problems are related to either the media or the burner.

[Mark Mcfarlane]

I’m a newbue too so take this with a grain of salt, but if you are shooting and delivering in 24fps, FCP will allow you to capture 24fps and edit 24fps on the timeline. Compressor will compress 24fps HDV/DV to 24fps SD MPEG-2.

However, in my one experiment with authoring 24fps in DVD Studio Pro it seems to take in 24fps but flags the footage as 29.97. Whether DVDSP is actually adding the extra frames (3:2), or just flagging the MPEG stream for the DVD player to add them if needed (e.g. add the pulldown to the composite or svideo output but not the HDMI output), I haven’t been able to determine.

I have a thread from yesterday asking about this in the DVD Studio Pro forum but got conflicting answers, one guy says the DVD standard doesn’t support 24FPS and another guy says it does,…

[Mark Mcfarlane]

Thanks Don,

My aspect ratio problem appeared only on the first DVD player I tried, which only plays in monochrome and it seems I have misplaced the remote control, so I can’t change the setup (its a miracle the player has buttons for eject and play, those are the only buttons on it)… I’ll keep looking for the remote or buy a new DVD player for my studio.

[Mark Mcfarlane]

Thanks David.

So my revised workflow looks like:

1) Capture in FCP as HDV 1440*720, 24P

2) Simple edits with dissolves in FCP

3) Export — Quicktime Movie — Current Settings. This creates a QT that precisely matches your timeline in every way.

4) Drag and drop one of the Best DVD presets in Compressor – once the audio and video opens settings are applied and open, highlight the video setting (the one that says M2v) and check the Inspector window that opens over toward the right — the click the second icon i.e. the Encoder settings and set the frame rate to 24 and the Aspect Ratio to 16×9.

BTW, for future reference, setting the Aspect Ratio to 16×9 sets a flag in the MPEG2 encode that is readable by all authoring programs, and will make your DVD display 16×9 on widescreen monitors and TVs and letterboxed on 4×3 TVs.

5) Build the DVD in DVD Studio Pro (where DVDSP somehow seems to have converted my footage to 29.97 fps according to the Asset pane)”

Actually, I did do an Export Quicktime Movie Current Settings – I wrote it down wrong, I’m typing from a different computer.

Also, 24fps and 16:9 were both selected in Compressor. I double checked and they are the defaults for my clips. and are disabled by default, you have to enable the control to change it so I am sure I didn’t change them last time.

If I want to do color work I have read here that I should convert the clips (or the timeline) from HDV to Pro422 or something similar, before running Color. Then use Compressor again to go to a Best DVD preset.

[Mark Mcfarlane]

Please ignore my question: 2) What do I do differently to get a normal TV to show black bands above and below the picture, instead of stretching it, while HD TV also display an unstretched image by default.

It appears my playback problem on a 4:3 CRT was the result of a really crummy DVD player. I tested with a better DVD player and I get the black bars at the top and bottom.