720/60p -> SD DVD Compressor settings?

B

bke1138

New member
Hi all!

I see a lot of posts about working with 24p footage in Compressor, but what about footage that is 720/60p? Using 720/60p footage shot with the HVX 200, I made a test DVD using the Compressor default settings and the end result was ugly. Compressor attempted to interlace the footage and ended up with awful aliasing.

For the next DVD I changed the frame controls so the Output Fields was set to Progressive, and that seemed to make a huge difference in quality. I'm curious if anyone else has experience tweaking with the Frame Controls. Like, how does Compressor take 60 frames down to 30? Would adjusting the quality of the Timing Controls also help? Anything else I might be missing?

thanks in advance for any insight!
Ben
 
I am not sure I know what do you mean, exactly, by the default settings? Do you mean the default settings for a particular preset? Which preset were you using?
 
Hi there,

I was using the preset for DVD: Best Quality - 90 Minutes. Specifically, I'm referring to the default settings in the Encoder and Frame Control tabs. Compressor tried to interlace the progressive footage, which surprises me—you'd think it'd be able to detect that it's 60p.

cheers,
Ben
 
How did you get your footage out of FCP? Did you export directly from FCP to Mpeg2, or did you output a QuickTime movie that you then opened in Compressor to transcode to Mpeg2? If the latter, the following from Apple's document "HD and Broadcast Formats" might help. It says: "Avoid converting high definition footage directly to standard definition media by using the Export Using QuickTime Conversion command directly with Browser clips in your project. This approach may introduce interlacing artifacts when the video is scaled." As I understand it, nesting a 720p clip in an SD sequence would also interlace the footage, although I haven't seen anything that warns of artifacting from that method.

According to the Compressor 2 manual, when exporting to MPEG2 directly from FCP using the "Export Using Compressor" command, Compressor is supposed to automatically preserve progressive frames, at least for 24p footage. You might try this if you haven't already. I hope that will help.
 
SD DVD can't do 60p. So it'll get converted to 60i... or I suppose 30p by dropping half the frames. The 60i should show interlacing on the computer, but should look fine when played on a TV set.
 
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