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FCP 3.0 to DVD

 
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the_77x42



Joined: 23 Oct 2005
Posts: 4

PostPosted: Sun 23 Oct 2005, 6:45    Post subject: FCP 3.0 to DVD Reply with quote

I'm using Apple's Final Cut Pro 3.0 to edit DV video from my (DV) camera. The reason I'm going with such a low version is because OS X isn't that stable on my G4. Anyway, when I compress my DV video it generally looks like garbage on my computer, and only okay on the TV.

I've tried compressing a simple 15 second DV clip with the following programs:
Compressor
DVD Studio Pro 1.0 Quicktime MPEG2 codec
TMPGEnc
BitVice MPEG2 encoder

Because the clip is only 15 seconds, I've cranked the bitrate on all these programs to 8000 CBR. I've tried encoding on the slowest, highest quality settings, but I just can't get quality even 90% of that of the original DV source plugged straight into the TV via S-Video. I'm expecting quality close to that of commercial DVDs, given that plugging the DV camera into the TV directly yields picture quality almost better than commercial DVDs.

It's frustrating that the Quicktime DV format won't encode properly in TMPGEnc (SEVERE frame dumping occurs), so I've tried saving as an uncompressed AVI first, and now I'm also trying the Firestore DV File Converter to go directly from Quicktime DV to AVI DV without any (de)compression.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is a hardware MPEG2 compressor necessary to achieve the quality I expect?
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the_77x42



Joined: 23 Oct 2005
Posts: 4

PostPosted: Sun 23 Oct 2005, 21:38    Post subject: Reply with quote

I should follow this up.

I spend a number of hours compressing the footage with various settings in in TMPGEnc after I converted the video from QT DV to MS DV.

Since the video is only a few seconds, I burned a dozen different encodings of it onto a CDRW (with a DVD structure) and played it on my TV DVD player to see which was best.

I noticed that the GOP structure had the most impact on picture quality, and it did look very good (still not commercial DVD quality). The problem was that a number of the compressions caused the video to chop up considerably. I suspect this may be from the fact I'm using a CDRW, but some compressions played fine. The video contains still images (Photoshop images edited at 720x480) and they do shimmer because of the interlacing, but I'm not very concerned about it.

To get the best quality, would it be safe to use:

CBR 8000
10bit DC
Motion search: Highest
I: 1
P: 14
B: 0
Basic YCbCr

I'll try these settings on a DVDR.

After my tests though, it looks like the basic TMPGEnc DVD settings produce the best results.... strange.
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RMN
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Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Posts: 587
Location: Lisboa, Portugal

PostPosted: Mon 24 Oct 2005, 18:19    Post subject: Reply with quote

If the DVD looks good on your TV but not on your computer, it would seem that the problem is related to the player you're using. Have you tried playing them with a different player, or on a different system?

As to the choppiness, yes, CDs are generally harder to read than DVDs (they need to spin much faster to sustain the same data rate). It should play smoothly on a DVD.

Regarding the best settings, TMPGEnc measures spoilage (the difference between encoded frames and source frames) in a slightly peculiar way, that isn't very "still-friendly" (ie, after a big sequence of P-pictures, your image might look better than the first frame of the GOP, causing a visual glitch when the next GOP begins). Make sure that you set the VBV buffer size manually (to 224), and if the problem persists, interleave P and B pictures (ex., B=1, P=7). That should make the "quality jump" less noticeable.

To get rid of the interlace shimmering, apply a vertical gaussian blur filter with a value of 0.4 pixels to the stills, in Photoshop, before creating the movie.

RMN
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the_77x42



Joined: 23 Oct 2005
Posts: 4

PostPosted: Wed 26 Oct 2005, 3:40    Post subject: Reply with quote

rmn wrote:
If the DVD looks good on your TV but not on your computer, it would seem that the problem is related to the player you're using. Have you tried playing them with a different player, or on a different system?


Well, it looks horrible on the computer (dark, fuzzy, etc. using PowerDVD), but on TV it's bearable. I've tried the CD a high end DVD player, but the quality didn't change and the choppiness is still there.

rmn wrote:
As to the choppiness, yes, CDs are generally harder to read than DVDs (they need to spin much faster to sustain the same data rate). It should play smoothly on a DVD.


Thanks for the new information! I'll definitely try this on a DVD-R soon.

rmn wrote:
Make sure that you set the VBV buffer size manually (to 224), and if the problem persists, interleave P and B pictures (ex., B=1, P=7). That should make the "quality jump" less noticeable.


I don't notice a 'quality jump' from scene to scene, but I thought that it is optimal to avoid using B picture if you can.

rmn wrote:
To get rid of the interlace shimmering, apply a vertical gaussian blur filter with a value of 0.4 pixels to the stills, in Photoshop, before creating the movie.


Yes, I've read this hear before. Question though, on progressive scan DVD players and TV's, would the gaussian blur decrease quality or keep it the same?

Finally, I'm still concerned about the quality of the final product. In one shot in particular, I have a pan shot of various piece of red machinery. On each machine is a large, white , two-digit number with black borders. There is significant artifacting around the white, which is not visible on the DV source. Even setting the encoding to all I-pictures doesn't get rid of the artifacting at CBR8. I'd like to know how DVD production studios get around this...
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RMN
Site Admin


Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Posts: 587
Location: Lisboa, Portugal

PostPosted: Wed 26 Oct 2005, 14:58    Post subject: Reply with quote

the_77x42 wrote:
I don't notice a 'quality jump' from scene to scene,


It's not from scene to scene, it's whenever a GOP starts. This happens mainly when encoding slideshows (i.e., videos made from stills). If any of your clips falls into this category, interleaving P and B pictures might help disguise the problem.

the_77x42 wrote:
but I thought that it is optimal to avoid using B picture if you can.


In general, yes. When encoding slideshows, however, there are no differences between the frames, therefore B-pictures will produce good results, and in some cases it helps avoid the slight jump in quality when a new GOP starts. For normal video, stick to I=1, P=14 (unless you need to use a low bitrate, and then B-pictures will help). Also, make sure scene change detection is enabled.

the_77x42 wrote:
Yes, I've read this hear before. Question though, on progressive scan DVD players and TV's, would the gaussian blur decrease quality or keep it the same?


Progressive scan TVs calculate full frames (from interlaced footage) by interpolation. So they'll always look slightly blurred. The gaussian blur (as long as you keep it at 0.3 or 0.4 pixels) should not be noticeable. Values above 0.5 might start to degrade the image quality.

the_77x42 wrote:
Finally, I'm still concerned about the quality of the final product. In one shot in particular, I have a pan shot of various piece of red machinery. On each machine is a large, white , two-digit number with black borders. There is significant artifacting around the white, which is not visible on the DV source. Even setting the encoding to all I-pictures doesn't get rid of the artifacting at CBR8. I'd like to know how DVD production studios get around this...


Using I-pictures only is a very bad idea; you would need 25 Mb/s to get good quality (and DVDs are limited to a third of that). See more about this issue here.

You will never be able to get quite the same quality as (good) commercial DVDs, because most commercial DVDs are made from film, that has a) less frames per second (meaning more bits are allocated to each frame), b) less noise (meaning the MPEG alogrithm doesn't waste bits trying to preserve it) and c) is not interlaced (progressive footage is easier to compress). Also, most "big" DVD releases are manually tuned in "complicated" scenes. You can do this with TMPGEnc using the "Set picture type" option but it's a long and boring process.

You should be able to get pretty good results with TMPGEnc (very close to DV), as long as there is no resizing or frame rate conversion going on, and as long as you use high / highest quality, a bitrate above 6500, and a sane GOP structure, with scene change detection enabled.

RMN
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