DVD Pro- need help

C

ColorBalance

Active member
I have a Sony EX1.

I upload the footage into FCS, export it to a Quicktime file using "current" settings. This file is a good file as I can play it, and use iDVD to burn a DVD.

However, my DVD Pro (a part of FCS studio) won't accept this file as it doesn't recognize the format. All I want to do is to make a standard NTSC DVD.

If QT plays the file by itself, iDVD works fine, then why DVD Pro is not recognizing the format? I've tried all the possible solutions that I could think of. Really desperate to solve this puzzle.
 
Thanks. Did finally figure out a few things late last night.

In terms of work flow, is it better to go through Compressor as opposed to exporting to a QT file with "current" settings and then use DVD Studio Pro?

Basically, can one bypass the Compressor completely and still get good result?
 
Export a self-contained movie at "current settings." You can use Compressor to export directly from FCP, but I have had problems with that in the past.

Once your self-contained FCP movie is out, use Compressor to prep it for DVD. You can use DVDSP to compress as it burns, but it is just as slow, clunky, and crappy as iDVD's compression... it'll ruin your picture. Compressor will give you cleaner compression, and make DVDSP very happy when it comes time to burn your DVD.
 
Thanks. It does make sense.

The best (quality) compression I see for a standard DVD is MPEG-2 6.2 Mbps - 2 Pass. I thought you could go as high as 9.00 Mbps. Am I missing something here? Also, my Mac Pro (with 8 GB Ram and plenty of HDD's) takes 2 - 3 minutes to compress 1 minute of video. Is this within the range? Seems too slow to me.
 
Going to 9 mbps has to be considered relevant to two things.

First, the maximum bit rate you set is dependent on how many minutes of footage you have and what size DVD.

9 mbps is going to choke most set tops, particularly when combined with aiff audio.

The maximum combined bit rate for video and audio is 10.2 mbps for 60 minutes or less of video

My suggestion is to stay at 7 mbps for video less than 60 minutes with Dolby2 audio at 192 kbps.
 
Regarding the encoding time, you can speed that up to get all your cores working on it.
Go into your system preferences and open Qmaster. Click the Options for selected services button. That will give you the option for choosing how many instances (cores) you want to use for Compressor. You can choose all (like 4 if you have four). You can name it, click the Start Sharing button at the bottom of the window and you're ready to rock.
This only works if you have already exported your quicktime (either self-contained or not) out of FCP. If you try to export out of FCP using Compressor it won't work.
When you go into Compressor and submit the batch you'll have a choice of using your computer or the cluster you set up with Qmaster.
 
I agree. But the Compressor doesn't give those choices in terms of Bitrate settings under DVD. The best I found was 90-minute DVD at 6.2 Mbps. It creates M2V and AC3 files to be used by DVDSP.

My current footage is only 15 minutes long. I want to achieve the best possible quality.
 
Compressor doesn't give those choices in terms of Bitrate settings under DVD
Click to expand...

Sure it does. You just cant change apples preset. Instead select the mpeg encoding you want in the settings window and then click the "duplicate selected setting" button. (Its the third one to the right. Next to the search at the top of the pain)

Now with your new duplicated setting go to the inspector pain, click the encoder icon and the quality tab. Voila! make your changes and drag your new preset up to your video clip.
 
Thanks, guys. I could go and change the bitrate, and also the number of CPU's used for Compressor.

The choice of CPU number did make a difference, quite a bit, though choice between 4 and 8 gave similar results. There was another choice in the Qmaster window called "Managed". Didn't know what to do with it.

In Qmaster, I see only two programs - Compressor and render. How about FCP? Can't we make that faster?

If I leave the # CPU's to be 4, how will it effect the other programs?
 
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The general rule for number of CPUs to use for Compressor is that you want 2gb of ram in your system for every instance of Compressor. So to run 4 instances, you'd want 8gb of ram, etc. Using all 8 cores with not enough ram in your system will actually slow things down somewhat because the system can't efficiently manage them all at once.

FCP is unfortunately not optimized at this point to take full advantage of multicore processing. Some filters do, others don't. Hopefully this will be greatly improved upon in the next FCP and Snow Leopard.

I recommend downloading the free iStat Menus utility and running the CPU monitor. Then you can always see if a program is using all 8 cores to their fullest or not.

With Compressor, just enabling the 4 or 8 instances in Qmaster isn't necessarily enough. You also have to make sure Compressor is actually using them when you encode something. Sometimes this means setting up a Virtual Cluster - basically treating one machine as if it were a group of networked computers in a render farm. When you submit your job in Compressor, you tell it to go to this virtual cluster rather than just your local machine (there's a drop down box to choose). Once you've got it set up, you should see all 8 cores light up at 100% and your renders should really scream :)

One further annoying thing: if you use Compressor droplets, you can't submit to a virtual cluster.
 
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