[Melissa Goldman]

Thanks for that idea and for responding.

I tried basically that same thing yesterday, but I was wasting hours dealing with problem title cards and other nitpicky things that did not like being moved from an HD sequence to an SD sequence. But it did give me an idea. This is my current plan, in case anybody cares about an update. And please tell me if this sounds like it’ll give me problems!

I tried shrinking the timeline in After Effects, which, while pretty slow, did look great. So I’m going to to create an SD quicktime from After Effects and then swap that back into my Final Cut timeline (which already has the compression and chapter markers inserted. Then I’ll export to Quicktime using Current Settings with DVDSPro Markers (which I think (?) should just pass the video through rather than recompressing). Why didn’t I think of this before??

By the way, the reason I’m worried about the compression markers is because there were some motion artifacts in the previous version of the DVD that I made. Because of some specific quirks about my project and workflow, I have reason to think that compression markers will be helpful all around.

THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR HELP! I really appreciate it.

[Melissa Goldman]

I fully appreciate why you need to check color on a calibrated monitor, what I don’t understand is why it would ever be acceptable for it to look bad on a computer. The situation I’m dealing with is that it already looks bad on my computer monitor.

If the video already looks bad on the progressive computer monitor, that seems like reason enough to look for problems in the workflow, no? Even if it looked OK on a TV, I wouldn’t be satisfied if playback looked bad on a computer. I haven’t heard of a scenario where the progressive monitor looked bad but the interlaced TV looked good. Again, let me know if there’s a problem with my logic or workflow. Thanks very much.

[Melissa Goldman]

I always thought that it looking good on the computer was necessary but not sufficient for it to look good on a television. I definitely don’t want it to play back ugly on a computer, even if the final output is DVD. My plan was to check it on the NTSC monitor once it looked ok on the computer. Am I thinking about this backwards?

[Melissa Goldman]

Hey Jeff. Thanks for the explanation, I appreciate it. I have not encoded a lot of DVDs, so it’s useful information. I am not sure how well the compression function works when Compressor is dealing with a file with no edit or compression markers. Maybe it’s not even something I should worry about. I’m using an average bit rate of 4.5. Is that low enough that it will make a difference?

I wasn’t using m2v as a source file, just noting that the options are different in Compressor for compressing to qt and m2v, and that the same frame control options seem to produce _drastically_ different effects in each, which I’m not sure I understand.

Thanks!
Melissa

[Melissa Goldman]

Hi Jeff. Thanks for the step-by-step instructions. I hadn’t seen that linking technique before. I went through as you suggested, but it’s not retaining the compression and edit markers. The Chapter markers are still coming through, but I can check the intermediate file that’s created in the process, and I see when I bring it back into Compressor that there are no additional markers. Do you think they’re still being used, but just not showing up in the intermediate file for some reason? Did this technique work for you in the past for compression markers? I tried Compressor 4, still nothing.

(Or do you know another way to export/import them?)

By far the nicest downconversion result I’ve gotten has been with Compressor’s frame controls for MOVs (these same controls seem to have very different effects when done on M2Vs, actually), so I’m really bummed that I can’t find a way to keep the markers through this extra step.

Thanks very much.
Melissa

[Melissa Goldman]

Hi Brad. Thanks for the article. I tried the method you suggested over the weekend, but actually the SD MOV created through the method you described looks significantly worse (grainier, less crisp) than the SD MOV that I created with Compressor from the HD MOV using the frame control settings. I tried making my DVD stream from that QT and it looks _extremely_degraded, although it’s good that the method you suggested retains the compression and edit markers.

Do you know of a way I could get better results doing the downsizing straight from FCP? Or another way I could retain or import the compression markers in Compressor after downsizing?

Thanks very much.
Melissa