problems creating a 24p dvd with h264 ...

vernallis

vernallis

Member
the situation is like this-

the footage was shot in 24pa and edited in 23.98 fcp time line.

i tried numerous exporting options and nothing seemed to preserve
the resolution and sharpness as well as h264

(actually all the standard exporting choices caused the picture quality to get rather
jaggy around the edges, why would this be?)

so i went with h264 and created a dvd in idvd,
checked it out on my computer and everything looked great,
but now my client is reporting that the dvd does not play correctly on their dvd player.
they say it looks like its only giving out 12 fps or so?

while their dvd player is not progressive
it was my understanding that it should interlace the 24p dvd for them,
not drop frames.

can anyone assist?

thanks!
 
First and foremost, from you post, NEVER EVER quality control something being sent out using your computer monitor. If a VHS, DVD, mini-DV, DVCam, DVCPro, Betacam, Digitbeta, HDCam, D5, whatever, leaves you hands, you need to double check it on a broadcast monitor. For any kind of quality control purposes, your computer monitor is absolutely useless. Okay, just had to get that out of the way, because its a major point that seems to creep up on the forum here a lot.

Okay so you shot 24pa on the DVX then I imagine? Editing at 23.98, okay, but what codec did you use for the editing timebase? Specifically, what codec/compressor did you use for the sequence that you wish to make a DVD from? After you picture is locked, once you start doing any kinds of effects or color correcting or such, you should consider bumping up to like a DVCPro 50 (DV50) workspace. It won't improve your footage, but it will help preserve things better for you when you leave FCP (in any manner).

H.264 is meant for HD encoding. There's likely your problem and why its not playing well for others. I'm not sure what iDVD did with the H.264 file, but frankly I wouldn't imagine it a very good thing. Do you have to use iDVD, do you not have DVD Studio Pro?

When leaving FCP to go to MPEG-2 (for DVDs) you should use Compressor or a third party option like BitVice. In either case you want to go from the raw sequence (Compressor) or uncompressed quicktime movie (BitVice) to create the MPEG-2. You certainly should not be exporting a Quicktime Conversion H.264 and then taking that to MPEG-2 for DVD authoring.

Also, your client could have problems playing back your DVD purely based on what brand of DVD-R you're using. Now I am encountering that kind of issue less and less for sure, but its not completely gone. DYI DVD's just don't have a 100% success rate as far as I'm concerned. And yes, if you make a 24P DVD but your client doesn't have the right DVD player and/or TV set, the pulldown should be added automatically during playback. Anyway, good luck.

cheers.
 
varicam!
thankyou ever so much for taking the time to write.

your comments/questions are very helpful.

the sequence was compressed with dv/dvcpro.

very interesting point about switching to dvcpro 50,
i have already color corrected and am ready to export.
so do you think it makes that much of difference
to do it now to preserve the sequence before creating a mpeg2 in compressor?

in the future i will try this after the cutting
and before the tweeking is done.

a few months ago i was working with animator/v.j.
and he seemed to think that using h.264/ other hd codexs with sd footage
could actually upres them...
i thought he was crazy,
but he had some metaphysical notion of holographs being used
in the process which made
it possible to create hd out of sd...

i do notice that when i exported my sequence as h.264
i could go full screen in quicktime player with superb resolution
but when i exported as "quicktime movie ntsc 23.98"
and then go full screen it looks really bad.

thanks again for the suggestions!
hopefuly it will fix the dvd glitch.
 
If you put SD footage out to an HD codec, its an artifical up-res. You can't invent more detail just by changing the codec setting. You shot 720x480. That's all the data you created. If you increase that to 1440x1080 or 1280x720 (sorry if those numbers are off, but you know what I mean) then you're needing create more data to fill the gap. Since you're not creating by physically shooting something, then your choice is to digitally create by running the raw data through some math algorithms. Now NLE's might be better at that now then before, but its by no means what I would call "good." If you know much about digital photography, think about the difference in optical zoom/better lens vs digital zoom/photoshop zoom. Perhaps a bit crude, but I think it makes the point.

As for holographs, there is holographic technology being developed. It is said that one might be able to get like 300GB's on one holographic disc. It is said to perhaps even dispalce the blue laser based DVDs before they even settle their Betamax vs VHS 2.0 war going on. But well you can Google around to read more up on that if you're interested. It has nothing to do with being able to take SD footage to and HD level after the fact though. So not sure what kind of line you're being fed there.

If you've already done all of your color corrections and the like in a DV25 timeline, ah I'm not sure how useful switching over to DV50 will be for going out to compressor. If Gun reads this post perhaps he can better comment on that. I'm used to working for a post house that always did an offline/online workflow. For our online workflow we always captured at uncompressed and worked in an uncompressed timeline for the CC and effects. So I would go out from that to Compressor whenever I had to do DVDs.

And again, you can't trust your computer monitor. The DV codec based quicktime movie likely won't look good on your computer monitor. I'd be a bit surprised if it did. That codec was never developed as a web codec (and thus meant for computers). That same quicktime would look worlds different if you did your playback on a broadcast monitor.

cheers.
 
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In essence there's nothing wrong with cutting at 23.98 DV. But if you did a lot of color correction, filters, effects, you can get a bump in your DVD's image quality by a direct export to Compressor or an export to Uncompressed then MPEG-2. It won't improve original DV footage but it will preserve the original quality of all of the effected material.

Don't bother with any of those other codecs on the way to your final MPEG-2. They do nothing but add concatenation and noise to your original signal.

Shameless plug- I show how to do this properly step by step on my Call Box DVD. Here's a sample: http://www.callboxlive.com/media/24pdvd.php
 
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