Encoding problems - HELP!!!

Duffdaddy

Well-known member
Anyone, and everyone - please lend me your advice.
I've been trying to encode my file for upload all night - literally, it's 8am now and no sleep :cry: and I'm beyond reason. I'm working FCP 5, with compressor and I can't get my file anywhere near the competitions required 34meg.
My original file was shot anamophic - and I thought I could just mpg4 it and set my own aspect ratio - which I can, but damn it - it just wont squeeze down. I'm also getting audio drop out, and on fast moving pieces a lot of compression noise. Plus I get these odd blue flashes of little squares which look like rainbow coloured compression artifacts - what's going on?!??
I'm desperate - if I don't get this entered all our weeks of work will be wasted....
Help! :embarasse
 
I've had best luck with Window Media Format 320x240 at 750 Kbits. With quicktime try Sorencen squeeze with the resolution some where around half the full resolution (for 16x9 it should be 475x240 approx. ) try 500 Kbits and then work your way down (by lowering the bit rate) to get 34 MB.

Good luck.
 
i just finished mine. now a few encoding questions (since i probably have only 1 try to get it right)

i shot 25fps PAL (720x576)
will you guys have any problems watching it?
should i use compressor- if yes which settings are best (just to upload it)?
should i also change the size?
or go with quicktime conversion (h.264 sound:integer =preset in fcp5) and then cleaner/or compressor?

i´m sorry to bother you, but i spent the last 48 hours on the computer to get this thing done
and i might suck at making movies (since i watched my movie 600 times), but i´m even worse on compressing...
please help!
 
glad I'm not the only one with this problem - all I can suggest is keep trying.
I'm starting to wonder though if my HD hasn't got some defective sectors cause there's just some really weird stuff going on - audio lag/syn in wmf, and strange compression glitches' that look like flashes of little blue or multicoloured squares...
 
I compressed using the Cable Modem - High Bandwidth setting on FCP HD (quicktime conversion), but turned the video bandwidth up to 800kbps instead of the default (~650 or so). That, combined with 32khz stereo audio added up to ~33MB, and looked nice. Final runtime: 4:58:29
 
ended up having to boot my mac from another drive, and reinstall QT - must have packed in sometime between 12 & 3am - that's about when things went really astray. Anyway, long story short, managed to squeeze it down to about 25megs - still looks good... enough. Sorenson video 3 gave me the best results without errors.
thanks for the suggestions.
 
Yeah, I used Sorenson 3 too Duff. 500x300 (widescreen), 900 kbits/sec, 24fps, with 12 keyframes/sec. Pretty good quality.
 
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