DVD encoding not as good as professional ones

MOVIE STUNTS said:
In FCP adding compression markers at scene changes also helps your overall video output to DVD.
Click to expand...

I just did a test where I added a few hundred extra Compression markers and then exported the clip to Compressor. My assumption was that because I would be forcing Compressor to add I frames all over the place thus giving me a much larger .m2v file.

The file size I got was exactly the same size as when I didn't add any Compression markers.

I have gone through my workflow carefully to make sure that I have exported properly.

Can anyone explain this?
 
ouputing to HD-DVD & Bluray

ouputing to HD-DVD & Bluray

Just to add to the chaos... and since I never found a satisfactory way in FCP to make excellent DVD's form HDV. However with 180 minutes on to a 4.5 gig DVD, you have to make concessions. If I had a 4 or 8 cpu mac or pc I could experiemnt more with the multipass and anti-aliasing, but maybe next year. I got the best results exporting out as a quicktime movie file or DVCPROHD file, then compressed that in dvd studio pro. it was noticably cleaner and not so oversharpened with nearly as much middle tones flexing under compression. don't know why, don't want to argue, it was, to me and everyone I showed it to.

But I was wondering, I noticed on the internet several companies are producing on demand HD-DVD and now Bluray and selling them at amazon.com. You supply the material in it's final form, (DVD authoring, or HD-DVD/Bluray authoring?????) and they sell it at amazon.com for you, and you take your cut. Has anyone done this?
 
Well since depending on the scene, encoding changes in the professional realm, why not split up the movie into parts? So for scene for scene, you can optimize the compression to your liking, THEN compile them all together in an authoring program.

- Kyle
 
In my experience 2 things make a big difference in Compressor:

1) Crushing the blacks a bit in the source footage often yields MUCH better compressed footage - all that noise in the blacks really throws compressor for a loop;

2) 1-Pass compression in Compressor seems to look a lot better than 2-pass. I'm not talking about motion rendition, which can go either way, but overall image quality is cleaner with 1-pass.

You should try to tweak the Compressor settings rather than just using the presets. Especially when you're talking about squeezing 80 minutes onto a DVD-5, you can see significant improvement by really nailing down the perfect bit rate. Keep in mind that Compressor has two conflicting numbers for amount of footage on the disc: The names of the presets assume Dolby-compressed audio, while the Quality tab in the inspector assumes uncompressed audio. If you play with the rates in the quality tab, you will get an updated estimate of footage that will fit.

But really, processing the source material is key. I think a lot of the more expensive encoders produce their benefits by pre-processing as much as by better encoding algorithms...
 
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