schleppin' productions

I recut an entire dance number. I'm really happy with the scene. Only the end titles remain. I've already started them in Boris 3D, rolling titles. They look professional. If you any tips for font I'd appreciate a suggestion. Thanks for any comments.
 
I finished the titles and went through the movie again -- big chunks came out. Ouch! Still have polishing to do and then ... I encode. Any tips for encoding the best DVD?
 
I couldn't rest, so I went through the movie again ... and finished it.

It's 3:23 AM. I think I'll export it and do an encode for DVD. By tomorrow I may have a copy to look at. That will be sweet.
 
Still 4 hours left to encode 83 minutes! It's crashed on me (not enough disc space) 4 times already. I have emptied out my hard drive. It's now 137 Gigs available. I hope this will do it, otherwise I'll have to go out and buy that big new hard drive I've been meaning to buy.
 
It did it! 95 Gigs!

But there is a problem. For no reason whatsoever a few of my titles that I did in Boris 3D have crashed into the scenes I had them supered over and the scenes themselves have disappeared!

So now I have a couple of minutes at the beginning of this horrendously difficult encode job that need to be replaced.

I'm banging my head on the walls because I can't think straight. Can I just re-export the 2 minute title section at the begiinning and then splice it at the beginning of the movie?

How do I go about compressing the two pieces of the movie for DVD output?

I'm taking a break to figure this out. If you know the problem I'm having let me know what to do. Thanks!
 
im just curious, does everyone have this much trouble putting their films to dvd, or is it just filmman having rare problems? i havent put anything to dvd yet, but i have made some quicktime movies and they look great.
 
Thanks for responding, Merc!

Here's the thing, in order to make the highest quality DVD, one has to take advantage of the HDV format properly. I used the Sony Z1U camera and shot this movie in 1080i 60i -- it's the first time I'm shooting a feature in digital.

I learned from one of the user groups that if one is going to get the best results encoding HDV, this is the procedure:

1) After the movie is finished, you export a QT .mov uncompressed 8 bit. This will give you a 1920x1440 image, which is HiDef!

2) And when encoding the mpeg2 the results will be by far superior to all the other SD formats. It is really dramatic the first time you see it with your eyes!

3) But the problem is that the file size is huge: 95 Gigs for an 83 minute movie instead of 16 Gigs. So with me the first problem was I'm running out of disc space. I really have to buy a tera disc or at least the 750 Gig discs now selling for $110 at Fry's!

4) Finally what I've learned (the hard way, because you're right, nobody's commenting on my encoding problems -- as if nobody else is having these problems :-) it this: one should export short sequences of the complex timeline (when there are a lot of layers and effects) and this will lessen the load on the processors when doing long projects like feature films.

Thanks again, Merc. Hope you'll come back and offer help.
 
man i wish i could offer some help. sorry but im new to all this and dont really know much. im surfing in here trying to learn, and as i see threads like yours, im getting worried about what kind of problems im gonna run into.

i cant frikin believe that these editing programs we use dont make these tasks easier. i mean, there should be a button that says "output to dvd" click that and sit back as it burns you a PERFECT dvd.
 
filmman said:
Thanks for responding, Merc!

Here's the thing, in order to make the highest quality DVD, one has to take advantage of the HDV format properly. I used the Sony Z1U camera and shot this movie in 1080i 60i -- it's the first time I'm shooting a feature in digital.

I learned from one of the user groups that if one is going to get the best results encoding HDV, this is the procedure:

1) After the movie is finished, you export a QT .mov uncompressed 8 bit. This will give you a 1920x1440 image, which is HiDef!

2) And when encoding the mpeg2 the results will be by far superior to all the other SD formats. It is really dramatic the first time you see it with your eyes!

3) But the problem is that the file size is huge: 95 Gigs for an 83 minute movie instead of 16 Gigs. So with me the first problem was I'm running out of disc space. I really have to buy a tera disc or at least the 750 Gig discs now selling for $110 at Fry's!

4) Finally what I've learned (the hard way, because you're right, nobody's commenting on my encoding problems -- as if nobody else is having these problems :-) it this: one should export short sequences of the complex timeline (when there are a lot of layers and effects) and this will lessen the load on the processors when doing long projects like feature films.

Thanks again, Merc. Hope you'll come back and offer help.
Click to expand...

Encoding To an Uncompressed Format from HDV is pointless. It is a waste of time. Just create an MPEG-2 120Min quality file. If you are using Final Cut Pro... just export using compressor and choose the 120 min option for MPEG-2.

It's seriously hard to make a crappy looking DVD these days.. everything is so automatic that unless you are encoding at an insanely low bit-rate things will look fine.

You shouldn't have to break up your footage at all to do this.. 95 min isn't very long. You can export it as one large file for the DVD.

Try it.
 
merc said:
man i wish i could offer some help. sorry but im new to all this and dont really know much. im surfing in here trying to learn, and as i see threads like yours, im getting worried about what kind of problems im gonna run into.

i cant frikin believe that these editing programs we use dont make these tasks easier. i mean, there should be a button that says "output to dvd" click that and sit back as it burns you a PERFECT dvd.
Click to expand...

There are options like this.

Filmman just doesn't really understand what he is doing, hence my post. Its incredibly simple. I must burn 10-15 DVD's a week on average.
 
Thank you, Loki, but I'm not convinced. It was a senior member of one of these user groups that told me about the 8-bit uncompressed procedure and my short movie (40 minutes) came out better looking than anything I'd done before in DVD SP.
However, I'm thankful to you for helping me get past this point, because I need to get my movie to a festival in time and I guess the 120 minute mpeg2 directly from the FCP timeline will have to do it for now. I know it will look fine. I've burned over a hundred hours of DVDs via DVD SP and they were better than any VHS I'd ever made before :-)
 
Ok, Merc, here is the news: I was able to combine the two pieces of the movie in uncompressed 8-bit format via Reference Movie! This resulted in an 870 MB file size, which didn't require 95 Gigs (that I didn't have left on my hard drive). I was able to bring this into DVD SP and now I'm in the process of encoding a DVD directly from the .mov file.

DVD SP is encoding the mpeg2 automatically. Problem solved! After a week of struggling with the technology, I finally am on the road to making an excellent DVD of my movie.

I'm going to also do an export from Compressor (as Loki indicated) and compare the two DVDs.
 
wow. thats awhole lot of stuff you put yourself through with such an easy task. so..i have a question. your final output dvd size was 900mb? and how long is the movie? if its a full feature, your project is going to look ugly being compressed down so much when blown to a bigger screen. your final product size on your dvd should fill pretty much the whole 4.7 gig of the dvd or the 8 gig on the dual layer. since your are throwing it up to a festival, you will want the best for your project and ill tell you now burning a feature lenght of 900mb to a dvd is not what you should be doin
 
Thanks for commenting. No, you're right...

The Reference movie is 870 MB, not the self-contained movie. I didn't make a self-contained .mov in QT for the Compressor. I placed the 8-bit uncompressed Reference .mov directly into the DVD SP for automatic encoding by the DVD SP program itself.

That's the beauty of it :-)
 
It was not 4 times better. It was not 10 times better. It was not 100 times better. It was a 1,000,000 better.

This is the only way to encode HDV for DVD.
 
filmman said:
Thanks for commenting. No, you're right...

The Reference movie is 870 MB, not the self-contained movie. I didn't make a self-contained .mov in QT for the Compressor. I placed the 8-bit uncompressed Reference .mov directly into the DVD SP for automatic encoding by the DVD SP program itself.

That's the beauty of it :-)
Click to expand...

That makes no sense.

You can't export a reference movie to "Uncompressed 8-bit" a reference movie is what it sounds like. It references the original sources files. So unless you have your original material in Uncompressed format, it is merely refernece your HDV source material.

I really don't understand why you didn't just take my advice. Allowing DVD SP to encode your material is just plain bad. You have such little control over any of the MPEG2 options.

At this point in time.. DVD creation should be.. and is... absolutely brainless unless you go out of your way to mess it up.

You're seriously making this out to be a big thing.. when in reality it is very very simple.
 
Thanks for checking in, Loki. You've given me great advice with encoding my trailers for the web.

Now regarding this uncompressed way of generating a DVD, here is what I did. I had a problem with a few titles that went haywire for no apparent reason. However, I had spent three nights exporting uncompressed that I didn't want all that work to go to waste.

Also, you have to understand that I didn't invent this process. On another user group I was told to go to uncompressed and then do the mpeg2. This was almost a year ago that I did this and the results were spectacular.

This time I had a dilemma because I had to files, one was 80 minutes, the other 3 minutes -- just the title section that was messed up in the big export. So I had two files, a 95 Gig file and a 6 Gig file. I had to overlap the two clips because I had music transitions. I wish I hadn't overlapped the two clips, because now I had a problem trying to edit the two clips together, which I couldn't figure out how to do in DVD SP. I don't think it's possible to do it.

So after posting the question on 3 user groups and not getting any comments, I came up with a solution myself. I would take both clips and open up a new project -- uncompressed 8 bit -- and edit them into the timeline, which I did. So now I tried to make a self-contained .mov but the export failed because I no longer had the space on any of my discs.

Then I thought why not do a reference movie? And this worked, because the reference are involving two uncompressed files that were made from the HDV timeline.

Instead of doing it in Compressor, it's best to do it in DVD SP because DVD SP creates a perfect size file each time, and maybe it doesn't allow control but the quality is outstanding. You don't seem to believe this is possible, and that I can't understand.

Anyway, thanks for your help. I wish you the best of luck with your project.
 
loki right, its simple. ive been doing it for a few years now. edit then mpeg 2 out. that simple. ive shot 16mm and hd and both converted to standard 480p without a problem and the footage was beautiful. all burned to a dual layer and the final size was near 8 gigs. your not going to get a hd feature on a standard dvd. all that uncompressed stuff is a waste of time because its not going to matter in the end
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top