[Nick Henry]

That’s interesting wisdom. I’ve read tutorials on the opposite, but I suppose the evidence and opinion doesn’t concur. I’ll change that.

I just did some tests burning right in DVDSP. It didn’t fix the problem though. These are the tests I did.

1. The sequence I had before to see if burning in DVDSP would work better.
2. With anamorphic checked regardless of how it looks in FCP, and burned with a widescreen setting in DVDSP.
3. Original sequence, set to top first dominance in compressor.
4. Original sequence, set to bottom first dominance in compressor.
5. Original sequence, with a deinterlace filter in FCP.

I’m not sure what the problem is, so I’m kinda throwing everything I have at it. While nothing fixed it completely, I seemed to have the best luck with the de-interlace filter. Not great, but a tad better. Its amazing how some shots look great, and others have edges that look like a mountaintop. I’m starting to run out of test ideas at this point.

Any thoughts?

[Nick Henry]

I also wanted to add a bit more about the workflow that might hopefully provide more clarity:

1. Final cut sequence>export to compressor
2. CBR at 7.0. MPEG-2 compression, aspect ratio 16:9, cropped to 1:66. I should point out that I did a test with a 4:3 ratio/dvd, and the stair stepping, hard and disgusting edges remained (even the main characters hair looked like an old SNES game!)
3. Into DVDSP, into a widescreen track. Build the DVD to a folder.
4. Burn the VideoTS folder with Toast.

Not sure if the above is relevant, but I’m trying to be the least vague possible.

[Nick Henry]

Hi Tony! Thanks for the reply!

I went into my FCP docs and cleaned out my thumbnail cache and waveform cache files. Got an interesting result actually. It did indeed work, for all but one project that was originally on the older external HD. When I opened that project up, I’d get the error message, plus it would now happen for all projects. Trash the thumbnail caches again, and it would go back to normal. It seems like this issue is linked to something bad in one project, like it ruins the caches. Perhaps it is corrupted somehow?

My edit rig:

Mac Pro (2007 version)
Leopard 10.5.8
Quad Core Intel Xeon, 10GB ram
ATI Radeon X1900 Graphics Card