[Russell Lasson]

Very true.

[Russell Lasson]

In the FCP manual it says:

Uncompressed
This isn

[Russell Lasson]

[Shane Ross] “[Russell Lasson] “Finally, you don’t need to render out all of your footage to a file! Compressor is smart enought to do the calculation without having to build the file first and waste space on your hard drive.”

Not in my experience. When I tried this without rendering, Compressor took 22 hours for a 90 min show. When I took 2 hours to render it, Compressor only needed 9 hours to make a DVD file. An 11 hour savings.”

But you had to render the file to disc which took up space. So whichever metheod people want to use. I use both depending on the situation.

And it was my understanding that uncompressed is uncompressed, not compressed. I’d like to learn more about it if I’m wrong. Do you have any info that you would suggest?

-Russ

[Russell Lasson]

As long as you don’t change the name of the clips, yes. After doing that though, you’ll need to change you timeline settings and some each clip’s basic motion and distort properties. This is usually pretty easy to do using the paste attributes command.

It can be a pain if there are a lot of scaled clips though.

-Russ

[Russell Lasson]

Select all of you media and choose media manager-Recompress. The choose the codec and destination.

-Russ

[Russell Lasson]

Cinema Tools and Compressor can’t add in a 2:3 pulldown that I know of.

We use Shake or After Effects.

-Russ

[Russell Lasson]

I would first suggest giving the client DVCPRO HD 23.98 to work with. It’s nice and the overhead isn’t that much more than DV.

DVCPRO HD 24P – 5.6MB/sec
DV 29.97 – 3.6MB/sec

As far a redigitizing to 10-bit, it works well… UNLESS your DP shot variable frame rate on a tape. I’ve had very few problems with onlining from tapes that were shot at 23.98 throughout the tape. But the tapes that have a variable frame rate shot kills the timecode from the tape if you want to redigitize. It can be rough.

If you digitize over firewire, then you’re just copying the information off of the tape and not recompressing it. From there you could convert the files to 10-bit when you are ready to do your online edit.

-Russ

[Russell Lasson]

Putting DV footage in a 10-bit uncompressed timeline does not compress the footage. It translates the current values of the DV footage into an uncompressed information, hence not compressing it. A capture card does the same thing if you digitize in from DV to an Uncompressed file. Now it won’t improve your original footage, but any thing that is done to that footage will improve (graphics, titles, color correction, transitions, etc.)

[Shane Ross] “I only suggest doing this if you are working in a DV timelne and have a lot of graphics and titles that you want to look good…and I only suggest going to DV50 or Photo JPEG at 75%… at most uncompressed 8-bit. As they will do better in an uncompressed timeline than a DV timeline. Doing this with just DV footage gets you nothing but large file sizes.”

Isn’t that basicly what I told jujuelliot to do? But go to 10-bit. All of the codecs you listed are only 8-bit (256 colors per channel). 10-bit can have 1024 colors per channel.

Finally, you don’t need to render out all of your footage to a file! Compressor is smart enought to do the calculation without having to build the file first and waste space on your hard drive.

Now, jujuelliot asked for the “best quality possible.” Will this process take a long time? OF COURSE! But when you start talking about “best quality possible” you stop talking about fastest possible option.

-Russ

[Russell Lasson]

Maybe the easiest thing for you do to is:

1. Duplicate your sequence and add “10-bit” to the name
2. Open your duplicated sequence and select Sequence – Settings
3. Change the Compressor to “Uncompressed 10-bit”
4. Select the Video Processing tab
5. Change to Render all YUV material in high-precision YUV
6. Change Motion Filtering Quality to Best

Now everything on your timeline says it needs to be rendered. You don’t need to render it. You now need to export your MPEG-2 file for you DVD using the 10-bit sequence using Compressor. You can then take that into DVDSP.

NOTE: If you brought in other graphics, titles, effects, etc from another program like After Effects or Motion, it would be better to re-render those out of those application in 10-bit uncompressed and replace the ones that came from your DV timeline.

This is about as simple as I can make it without going into a full online edit.

-Russ

[Russell Lasson]

If you export it as a QuickTime Movie – Current Setting (not QuickTime Conversion) then you will have exactly what you have in your timeline. It just copies data.

I’m trying to decide if I really want to tell you about the “Best Possible Quailty” workflow. It’s quite a bit of explaining.

-Russ