Still don't know what I am doing..

[Aschu]

I've been posting questions (potentially not the right ones) about compression techniques and reading about it on this forum and the internet..

But I have yet to stumble on the right information and I feel as though I still don't really know much about compression. I seem to never be able to get the image even close to what it looks like in fcp after I compress it. I know I will lose some quality but I think way too much is being lost.

For my last project, my settings were as follows.

DVX100B- 24p, Squeeze Mode

FCP- Timeline Field dominance is off. I upload the footage at 29.97, NTSC and use the DV NTSC Anamorphic input.

When I am all done editing with the footage I send it to compressor.

Compressor settings-H.264, frame size 640X360, and I usually leave the rest of the settings alone.

When I compress it I compare the footage to the original and I really feel like to much of the image is different. It is lighter, the image seems flat, a little more grain is visible, and not as sharp.

Is compressor the program of choice for most or would you suggest another? At this point my audience is always watching on the internet. Any suggestion would be great.

 

[Demistate]

It sounds like you're describing a few seperate issues that are happening when you recompress your file

Scaling:

When you resize the original footage to another size, you are scaling it. Scaling in NLE's have been notoriously bad. The only compression software that I've found that could down-sample (scale down) an image properly was AviSynth. I like the Lancos 4 method they use for downsampling. (Windows only)

Color space conversion:

When you're talking about the colors looking different or not as contrasty, you're talking about a color space conversion error. It could be becuase the footage your watching on the PC isn't being translated properly. Or it could be that the levels are being put into the file wrong.

Since you shot your medium as SD, it's designed for SD TVs not Monitors. Quicktime player is a terrible player to validate your exports. There are also issues with MAC OS X running a different gamma/colorspace than the rest of the world, so unless your web browser isn't doing a color space translation, video will always look "washed out" on the mac. Try validating on a Windows machine running Firefox or Internet explorer if your final ouput is to be viewed in a web browser.

Last:

You need to enable Final Cut Pro compatibilty in Quicktime 7 and use that to validate your media:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=9489583

Output and compression is a whole bag of hurt on the Mac. It's only half a bag on the Windows platform today.