[Sofi Marshall]

Thanks Shane. I tried this and still no luck, though it’s possible I’m not choosing the correct settings in the reverse telecine dialogue box in cinema tools. I also tried a bunch of different settings in Compressor and still had no luck.

After hours of searching, I saw someone had posted that they had luck with a program called JES Deinterlacer, so I followed their advice, did some research on settings for that and it worked! I can not figure out why Compressor and Cinema Tools (apps that I actually paid for) can not handle this conversion properly when a free app can do it with incredibly smooth results. The settings that I used in JES Deinterlacer are the same ones I’ve been using all along with Compressor and Cinema Tools, so I really don’t understand it.

Anyway, it works and that’s all that matters… this experience just reinforces the idea that the editor has to be brought on the project BEFORE any shooting begins.

Thanks so much for your help!

[Sofi Marshall]

Thanks Shane, I tried this, but the footage turns out even more interlaced. I’m really confused by this statement in the FCP guide to HD formats:

Important: The Log and Transfer window cannot remove standard 3:2 pull-down. To convert footage with 3:2 pull-down, you can ingest the media at 29.97 fps and then use Cinema Tools to remove the pull-down.

When I ingest the media as 29.97 and then attempt to remove the pulldown in Cinema Tools, I get Error: this movie file has temporal compression. I don’t understand what this is happening or how to fix it. There’s no way to transcode to Pro Res while I’m ingesting through Log and Transfer is there?

I realize that the footage was recorded incorrectly for editing at 23.98, but there must be a way to remove the pulldown from this footage and get good looking results.

Are there any other options I can try?

[Sofi Marshall]

Thanks Shane. It doesn’t work to check remove pulldown in Log and Transfer because the footage wasn’t shot 24a, but 24 (big mistake on the DP’s part). But I need to somehow get the footage to 23.98 because it needs to be incorporated into other 23.98 timelines. I want it to be Pro Res because the rest of the footage is Pro Res, so I’d like everything to be the same format.

How do I remove the pulldown in Compressor while converting to Pro Res?

[Sofi Marshall]

To close out this thread…

I encoded the DVD as CBR at a bit rate of 6.5 and have a good looking product with no skips on the DVD that I burned out of DVD SP.

Thanks to everyone for the input, and hopefully next time this process will be a lot easier!

[Sofi Marshall]

Here is my workflow. Please tell me if you think I’m doing some wrong, missing a step, etc…

I’m editing 1080 24p from Sony HDCAM in Avid Media Composer. I’m exporting my film as a “same as source” QT reference file.

Then I bring this file into compressor and use the “DVD: Best 90 minutes” compression setting, changing only the bit rate to be 7.5.

Then I bring that into DVDSP, it imports with a green check mark and I make my DVD.

The DVD quality is acceptable, but it does tend to randomly skip when played in most DVD players, and sometimes skips up to 30 seconds of a scene before playing normally again. Maybe this has to do with burning the DVD straight from DVDSP? I know in iDVD I would always make a disk image and then use disk utility to burn and would get much more reliable DVD’s. Should I be using disk utility or even Toast to burn?

So there’s nothing wrong with this method, but it seems like I should be able to use a higher quality compression since my film is so small (10 Minutes). Since I will distributing this DVD to festivals, I want to make sure that I’m getting the very best quality possible. If using compressor to go to m2v is the best setting, then that’s just what I’ll have to do. However, after doing some research is seems like a lot of people are unhappy with the way that Compressor deals with the downscale from HD to SD. In that case, I’m willing to try other programs that may handle the downscale better, but the BitVice is pretty expensive.

Thanks!
Sofi

[Sofi Marshall]

Thanks! I will give this a try today. It does seem like Compressor’s down scaling and encoding to m2v is not the best quality out there, so I’m definitely willing to use an alternative, even it takes longer.

[Sofi Marshall]

I used the setting for DVD: Best Quality 90 minutes from Compressor and pulled up the bit rate to 7.5 then burned the SD DVD with DVDSP.

Initially, I had tested the DVD on a TV and the contrast/colors were off and it looked jumpy, but it turns out that the problem was with the TV in that it was very old and it seems like it was having a problem with the progressive scanning. I just got to test it on another TV and the quality was much improved, though the disk stuttered in a few places, which was strange because when I went back and played through those areas again, there was no stutter. Additionally, there was no stuttering on my computer, so I’m assuming it’s just the DVD player having a little trouble with the recorded DVD.

Anyway, your suggestions for the m2v compression did yield the best results so thank you! I understand now what you’re saying about that tutorial and why I was getting very unstable DVDs. I guess I’m still getting used to the idea that after spending so much time and money on an HD project, I have to almost go back to SD to distribute it.

Thanks, everyone, for the advice!

[Sofi Marshall]

Looks like it’s trying to include my comma in the link. The tutorial I was following is here:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/hd_dvds_on_sd_dvds_young.html

As an update, I created an SD DVD using the m2v encoding from Compressor. While everything is working and the DVD plays well, the quality is really very bad. I know it’s always a difficult thing to go from HD material to an SD DVD, but it seems there must be a way to get higher quality since I have such a short film.

I have heard that people get better quality using the h.264 codec with iDVD (since DVDSP doesn’t support it for 1080i), so maybe I will try that next.

Any ideas on how I can get better quality?

[Sofi Marshall]

Thanks for clearing that up! I know there are a lot of answers out there, but there is also a lot of conflicting information. For example, I had initially been following this tutorial https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/hd_dvds_on_sd_dvds_young.html, which does say to set the preferences to HD DVD. However, that method hasn’t really been working for me, so I’m giving your suggestions a try now.

[Sofi Marshall]

Very helpful, thank you!