At work we always had bad results with compressor. Ugly jaggies and what not on our Varicam footage. Our work around was to nest the 720p timeline into a DVCPRO 50 (anamorphic) timeline, and then once it was down converted throw that file through compressor. The results were way better.
But recently we discovered a simpler way to do this through compressor. Compressors DVD encode presets assume you aren't likely to be resizing and they skimp on quality there. If you manually edit all the frame controls in the inspector to the best quality, your results will be much improved. (the resize filter being the most important in this case.)
This is also the section to pay attention to if you are encoding to H.264 as the presets ignore resizing as well. You should note that encode times through compressor will take a lot longer with this quality setting, but at least you can continue to work in FCP on something else while batch monitor encodes while you could not if you were rendering a downconverted timeline in FCP.
~Ian
But recently we discovered a simpler way to do this through compressor. Compressors DVD encode presets assume you aren't likely to be resizing and they skimp on quality there. If you manually edit all the frame controls in the inspector to the best quality, your results will be much improved. (the resize filter being the most important in this case.)
This is also the section to pay attention to if you are encoding to H.264 as the presets ignore resizing as well. You should note that encode times through compressor will take a lot longer with this quality setting, but at least you can continue to work in FCP on something else while batch monitor encodes while you could not if you were rendering a downconverted timeline in FCP.
~Ian
