Divx from Final Cut Studio -- Any experiences?

Ryan Hawk

Ryan Hawk

Member
I’ve been using the HVX200 camera with the Firestore FS-100 for a while now. Have a bunch of footage stored, but getting it compressed is sure an interesting challenge. Most of our clips will run on PC-run flatscreen displays, so mov files are not a good option. So far we’ve had the best results going from H264 mov files (exported from FCP) converted to Divx on a PC. Doing a direct Divx conversion with the free trial of Divx for mac is of really poor quality—lots of blocky artifacts even at the highest settings. Anyone know if that changes when you get the paid-for version, or is there a better way to export to Divx from Final Cut Studio 5.1.1?

This is HD content by the way.

Thanks!
 
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How about this question instead:
Anyone using Divx to export from FCP? If so, does the purchased version allow you to go beyond the 4000 kbs quality level the trial version caps you at?
 
I'll jump in here and help you out.
Yes and no. It goes up to 6000 kps, but doesn't seem to go any higher. Works much better on PC.
 
First of all, you never want to compress more than once. If I understand correctly, you were going from DV->Apple H.264->DivX 5? This process introduces all kinds of artifacts because you are using 2 lossy codecs in a row.

Export to a Quicktime MOV, whatever codec your HD is using, and use ffmpegX to auto-encode your project into XviD.

DivX is a decent codec, and the latest 6.x versions really rival XviD. On Mac, things are different. Video encoding is more developed in the Windows world. MeGUI + AviSynth is an unbeatable combination. XviD should give great results at under 2000kbit for SD, not sure about HD, though I have occasionally gotten good results at ~6000kbit for 720p24.

try x264 also, through ffmpegX (though this may have an old x264 build), or MeGUI in Windows. This is a MUCH better codec than Apple's h.264 implimentation.

~MiSfit
 
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