Compressor 2 issues...

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Is it just me of has anyone else had problems with the output quality of using the Compressor 2 that ships with FCP5?

I've been doing come direct comparisons encoding the same material using Compressor 2 on my dual G5 an Compressor 1.? on my Dual 500 G4 and Compressor 1 has won every time. All my compressor 2 encodes are riddled with motion atifacts, especially on 60i encodes. 24p materia is much better but now after these side by sides, even my 24p stull looks better when I encode it on my G4 tower, eventhough it takes like 25x longer to encode. What gives? I don't remember always having this problem though, maybe only for the past 6 months or so. Anyone else have a similar experience? Should I reinstall all my software again? I do that every now and then anyway if I have enough time between projects.

 

[Kandinsky]

I have the same problems, but I have heard that Compressor 2 is making lots of artifacts when using the variable bitrate encoding, especially in dissolves and slow motions. I am currently trying to export in constant bitrate to see how it's gonna end up looking like.

Anybody else have more experience with this that they could share ?

 

[riggieri]

Do you use 1 pass or 2 pass for the VBR? Alos try making your own presets, thats what i do and i don't get many artifacts.

 

[eliotbaring]

I have done 2 passes with best quality motion estimation and it look so crap.
Surely apple cannot sell this as a working product.

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

I always make my own presets. Usually do a healthy 6-8 mbps vbr 2pass for video 192kbps for ac3. My 60i material looks like crap on encode. 24p stuff is fine. This didn't happen before.

 

[eliotbaring]

Encoding HDV looks absolute crap but exporting to SD quicktime them using comperessor seems to have fixed my compression artifact issues.

 

[ullanta]

There's been a lot of talk about this, and Apple has posted some fixes. Basically, Apple claimed that if you had a previous install of Compressor 1, you needed to eradicate it's presets and preferences from the system, as they were incompatible and caused the problems you're describing, among others. This helped my case a bit... but I'm still not impressed with Compressor 2 vs. Compressor 1, especially in 2-pass VBR. Weird things happen!