[Rich Rubasch]

Hmmmm…not sure anyone has nailed this one yet! My suggestion is that you are using digital photos that have a resolution so large that FCP has to scale them down to 20% scale or less. If that is the case, I suggest pre-scaling all your photos down in Photoshop (use a batch action to do it on many) and perhaps add a pixel or two of blur to them as well. I have a feeling that the noisiness that you are seeing is not due to codec or monitor, but rather feeding FCP images that have resolution way too high for editing in a timeline.

Just had a client who had this issue in Vegas, and scaling the images down a bit and adding just a bit of blur made them silky smooth in the final DVD.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Try to settle on an intermediary codec and frame size and get everything into that codec…perhaps ProRes. That should then be easily strung out in a timeline that matches the clips.

I think just trying to drag all these elements into one timeline without any pre-encoding will not get the results you want.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Bob is right here again. Here’s a quick experience we recently had.

We usually have an upconverting DVD player in the conference room feeding a 32 inch Dell HD LCD TV. When the DVD player finally died we substituted in an older industrial Denon player that is a solid player, but not an upconverter. Event he component outputs to the LCD were pretty crunchy and revealed lots of noise. Composite was nearly unwatchable. We got a new upconverting player and send the HDMI out to the monitor and DVDs look much better.

It is possible that the AV company used a non upconverting player and using composite outputs…YUCK!

One more thought…if I had known that the plasma screen on site was going to be a 50 inch model, and as long as I was posting in HD anyway, I would have used Toast 9 to burn a simple Blu-Ray disc and provided a brand spanking new Blu-Ray player to the client to hook up to the monitor. Or I would have inquired to see if the AV company had Blu-Ray players. Your video would have looked great.

One last thing…can I assume that the DVD was authored as anamorphic widescreen video? 50 inches is a lot of upscaling to do, and different DVD players handle it better than others. Without an upconverting DVD player you can’t expect much.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

If you assign your internal drive as the capture scratch then relink the files on the other drive to the missing media everything should link up just fine. The capture scratch is basically where all new uploaded footage will go and it is where FCP looks for media. But if you move the media it will look offline…just relink it to the external drive.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Are you on a Mac or PC? On a Mac you will need an MPEG compressor like BitVice or Episode. On PC many DVD authoring programs can import AVID QT movies and encode on output to the disc.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

We pretty much use 6.2 CBR exclusively in compressor and BitVice when we want a great encode. But all the Anamorphic stuff on standard DVDs looks pretty jaggy on widescreen LCD’s. However, we just got a new DVD player with a pretty decent upconverter so it smoothed it out pretty good. Results will vary.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Cleaner could do it, but as suggested, it will re encode the clip adding more compression.

Cleaner had a feature that would allow adjusting the in and out point and adding fades to the heads or tails.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Is the Avid on a PC or Mac? If on a Mac, can’t you export a self contained clip and bring it into commpressor? If on a PC you can export out a self contained QT and make sure you have the AVID codecs loaded on the Mac.

Help?

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

If you can find a business insurance company who reps The Hartford insurance, I know they also provide policies specifically for video production companies. I had to cancel State Farm with my company because the video production specific policies were a bit beyond what they offered.

I still have my car and home with State Farm however!

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Wow, sounds like “badkarma.com” would be a good URL. Dark colors, grays, murky fonts. Dark and hard to read. That would be my design approach.

I suppose no one would offer up their really good clients?

Ha!

Oh, I just thought of Angie’s List. I subscribed for a while. Wonder if she has production companies on her site…

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media