[Mark Spano]

Allow me to offer one slightly contrary argument:

If you send an SD DVD, you have no control over how it will look if it going to be up-converted or played back in a Blu-Ray player at the destination. If you up-res and make a Blu-Ray, while you do not gain any benefit or resolution or image quality, you at least have more control over how it will eventually look when played.

Just two bits…

[Mark Spano]

Currently using 6.0.6 on a quad 2.5 G5. Enjoy…

[Mark Spano]

Tom,

Keep in mind that almost 100% of studio DVD releases are dual layer. That gives you 8.5GB of space on a disc. With a handy tool like the Excel bit budget doc that Ken Stone came up with, you can see that a DVD feature of 2 hours with 5.1 and stereo audio, plus another half hour of bonus features with the same will be able to be encoded at an average bit rate of 5.5 Mbps, which is perfectly adequate for MPEG-2 VBR on a DVD. Most commercial DVDs I’ve measured come in around an average of 4.2 Mbps, varying wildly from 1.8 to 7.7 second to second. A very good MPEG-2 encoder will take advantage of variable bit rate compression to give better than “average” rate results. Compressor can be really good, but there are likely standalone encoders or dedicated software that can do better.

[Mark Spano]

To do that sort of thing would require some more complicated messing around. Basically, you’d copy the DVD contents from the disc, and open the DVD in MPEG Streamclip. From there, you can Demux to M2V and AC3. Now since the feature is long, you might wind up having multiple M2V and AC3 files that you’ll have to string together in DVD Studio Pro. In there, you can add your menus and other fun stuff. That’s the only way I could see all of this working – you’d have to test it to make sure that there won’t be any picture breaks (from stringing multiple files together on the DVDSP timeline).

[Mark Spano]

Chris, that is great. I never thought to edit the structure files after the fact. I looked and found a Mac app that does it pretty easily.

My DVD Edit

And a nice tutorial:

here

I will definitely put this to use. Thanks again for the tip!

[Mark Spano]

I know that droplets created under 3.0 don’t work in 3.5. I’ve had to recreate presets in 3.5. One thing that 3.5 added though is a neat little feature that might come in handy for you. If you have a file that’s been encoded, you can drag it to the preset window and it will create a new preset based on how this file was encoded (for the most part). You may have to tweak it slightly, but it’s pretty good. I don’t know if you can drag an old droplet in there, but that might be worth a shot.

[Mark Spano]

Any time I’ve tried doing this, the best results I’ve found have been with playing it out, real time, to a standalone DVD recorder. The extended play encoders seem to be able to do a slightly better job than any offline encoder I’ve used. Understand, however, that no standalone DVD recorder I know will encode anything other than a 4×3 full frame – if you absolutely need anamorphic, then you have to use an offline encoder and author in DVD Studio Pro or the like.

[Mark Spano]

OK cool – thanks for the clarification. My bad for not seeing the OP’s bit about PAL. I think I’ve been able to do inserts but I’ve always kept them to the AA frame (00, 05, 10, 15, 20, 25) so the pulldown stays consistent. I believe the Nitris DX is adding pulldown post-sequence on a global level, so it isn’t clip-to-clip. I could definitely be wrong about it though… 🙂

[Mark Spano]

Michael,

Do you not recommend using Universal Mastering for some reason? This method (1080/23.976 -> 30i NTSC) has worked pretty flawlessly for me using Symphony for at least a year. Digital Cut options offer downconvert and as long as you supply the deck and the Nitris DX with the same SD ref, everything is peachy, no transcoding necessary. As I understand it, the hardware is doing the pulldown insertion and downconversion.

[Mark Spano]

This problem sucks, and it’s been in FCP forever. I know it’s difficult to RTFM when the FM is almost 2000 pages long, but here’s a relevant section:

Playback Offset: This option allows you to compensate for latency between
Final Cut Pro device control (the number in the Current Timecode field) and your
video interface output, since some video interfaces take some time to process the
video signal. This is only an issue when using separate connections for device control
and video output, such as serial RS-422 device control and a PCI video card.
Enter a number to compensate for delays between the start of playback and the start
of recording on your deck when editing to tape. This is normally set to 0. Enter a
positive number to start playback before recording begins; enter a negative number
to start playback after recording begins.
Note: If the first frame is duplicated over several frames when you’re editing to tape,
enter the number of duplicated frames in this field to eliminate the problem.

So do that. But don’t expect it to be accurate all the time. At least this will solve part of the problem (the duplicated frame issue). I have talked to AJA, Apple, and anyone else who will hear, and no one seems to be able to offer any fail-proof method of using FCP with tape machines. Not many people realize also that lots of times video and audio will be off in both capture and layback by frames or even a field. I am convinced (especially after this latest bout) that it’s impossible to solve. I trust the Symphony systems in house for frame and field accurate edits – not FCP/KONA/Matrox/Blackmagic/etc.. Your mileage of course may vary…