FCP 3 reel

Taggart Lee · February 24, 2004

Hi all,

I'm cutting a reel at home on FCP 3 and have wondered for some time about the diference in quality I see between my NTSC monitor and the final output to DVD (DVSPro) on a regular CRT tele. Keeping in mind that the works were org. on S16 and 35, and other than it being a larger screen, should I be seeing an decrease in saturation and a marked increase in grain? Had good, fat negs to start with, happy with transfers. I've crushed blacks a bit, worked with the color and sats in FCP too and mostly played with the bit rates (8.0 presently) to export MPEG2 in Studio Pro but there remains a difference in quality from what I've seen of the same material from Lightning Dubs etc.

Any thoughts?

Taggart Lee

DP/OP

LA

Transfer was to dvcam or mini dv in some cases and captured to FCP with a DSR-11.

Michael Nash · February 25, 2004

I'm still learning the subtleties of desktop video manipulations, so I'm not sure I have the right answer for you. I'm used to Avid and telecine post on broadcast tape formats.

Too much color correction in DV25 colorspace will reveal compression artifacts that appear "noisy"; not exactly like film grain but could appear similar or aggravate what grain is there. This could be PART of what you're seeing.

As for the other problem, let me see if I've got this straight -- you're seeing a difference in the color and noise between the NTSC output before encoding to DVD, compared to playback from the DVD? That sounds like a problem with the DVD encoding -- bearing in mind that whatever compression artifacts you introduce during editing will only be compounded once it goes to DVD (depending on the bitrate).

Also make sure your screens are calibrated to the same signal. Try running color bars and any other test patterns you can to both your NTSC monitor that's tied to your system, and the larger TV that's hooked up to your DVD player. You've got to start eliminating the variables between all the hardware before you can really tell what you're looking at. Try running color bars straight to your TV, then play color bars from a DVD and compare the chroma and blacks. Are they the same? If not, then is it a hardware issue (connection) or a signal issue (encoding on the DVD)? Start at one end of the pipeline and work your way back until the behavior of every interface is accounted for.

I'm sure other folks here like Phil and Alvin are much more on top of this issue than I am. I'm a cameraman with lots of broadcast experience, but I'm just starting to learn the issues of desktop post so I can start cutting demo DVD's at home.

Phil Rhodes · February 26, 2004

Hi,

Well, if it looks OK on your monitor it's the MPEG-2 encoder. Some of them, particularly on the Apple Mac where people tend to be scared of control boxes, are horribly naive.

If you have a noisy DV original with lots of chroma distortion and clipping from colour correction, this will exacerbate the MPEG problem.

Phil

Alvin Pingol · February 26, 2004

Also, some MPEG2 encoders can be good at compressing, but (for some reason) terrible at converting color formats. Since you're working with DV25 material, there shouldn't be a problem (both DV25 and MPEG2 are YUV). However, there somehow may have been an intermediate step in there (perhaps the format you saved it as before the final compression?) that converted YUV to RGB. When the RGB got converted back to YUV for compressing, it wasn't done properly.

One encoder I can think of that does this is TMPGEnc, where some highlights turn green-ish during the RGB-->YUV conversion and saturated colors become washed out and faded looking.

A workaround that seems to make things all better is to do the conversion beforehand in something simple like AVISynth, using nothing more than a few paramaters to get it converted (in realtime).

I don't know if your encoder supports AVS files, but if so, say, and I'll help you out. Either that, or double check the export settings in FCP to make sure the signal is YUV.

Hope this helps...

Jason Mann · March 4, 2004

However, there somehow may have been an intermediate step in there (perhaps the format you saved it as before the final compression?) that converted YUV to RGB. When the RGB got converted back to YUV for compressing, it wasn't done properly.

If you're exporting an MPEG2 from FCP, you shouldn't have to save it in a different format before the conversion. As I understand it, this is one of the benefits of Compressor (you can also do MPEG export with the Export > Quick Time Conversion option.)

If you have to save an intermediary file before encoding, I think rendering it with the Animation codec should help reduce compression artifacts.

But I may be wrong. Anyone?

Phil Rhodes · March 4, 2004

Hi,

This really shouldn't be a problem with competent software!

I've recently been noticing some fairly big problems with general-use codec implementations on Windows systems, particularly a very very big problem with the Panasonic DV codec and Adobe Premiere 6.02; I'll probably post on a more appropriate forum for that kind of thing once I've fully characterised the fault.

However, suffice to say that if you have sufficient control of the filtergraph you shouldn't lose that much by RGB/YUV conversions, so long as they're done competently and at a high level of precision. This may be a higher level of precision than that which Quicktime is capable.

Phil

David Mun · March 19, 2004

its funny that i found this post here because i'm going through the same problem. I just bought a g5, duel 1.8GHz, 1 gig of RAM and 400 gigs of HD space and final cut 4. and i'm trying to figure out this compression crap too.

i've digitized fotage on DV NTSC 48KHz and then used iDVD to make my reel and i can see compression in certain areas. I looked at my friends reel and his blacks are solid as well as having no artifacts and he sued a sony vaio. so does that mean the G5 sucks? or is it me? haha.

I then tried redigitizing everything at Uncompressed 10-bit setting and still got the same type of compression. Then i thought to myself, it must be in the burning process and what steps i'm doing in encoding the DVD. So after redigitizing and recutting my reel for the 5th time, i'll keep you all posted on wat the next dvd will look like. BTW, once i get this down, anyone interested in me cutting your reel for you? ;) need to make money on this thing. I'm getting an office in santa monica and might be starting a offline post house as an extra side of income. Who knows maybe get out of camera for good....nah i love camera work too.

Dave

Jake Kerber · March 30, 2004

The problem you're having with artifacts can most likely be attributed to iDVD. iDVD does the encoding for you, so no matter how uncompressed and clean your footage is in FCP, iDVD will consistently deliver a less than desireable looking DVD. I ended up purchasing DVD Studio Pro 2 and using Compressor from FCP4 for the encoding. Huge improvement. I'm fairly positive you'll have to upgrade to something beyond iDVD for authoring if you want to see a substantial improvement. BTW, I'm running a dual 1.25 G4 w/superdrive and it has been great. I'm sure your G5 is even better.

Good luck,

Jake

Rich Steel · March 30, 2004

I've been FCP Based for over 4 years now and have had time to experiment with diffrent export codecs etc....

The best one to date that seems to retain what I see on the Broadcast Monitor is the following:

In FCP Export your Timeline (In-Out) as a reference movie.

Open the reference movie in QuickTime Pro.

Go to movie properties in Quicktime and Check the High Quality Box.

Then Export your reference movie as an MPEG2, bit rate set between 6 or 7 within Quicktime Pro. Anything higher than this can cause problems when you start encoding in DVDStudioPro. If you do have issues with the encode there's a fix for it. Email off board and I'll reply with details.