I have DVD Studio Pro 2 and also have Compresser. I am encoding at a 7.9 bit rate, Two Pass (with DVD Studio Pro 2). I seem to get pretty good quality sometimes, but sometimes I see degrading yucky sploches on my video, it looks bad. I have also seen moziac blocks as well. This is not good send to clients, does anyone have sudgestions on getting the best possible quality output?

Canopus ProCoder is generally considered to be among the best. I believe it will even do 3-pass encoding or so I've been told.

ProCoder Express is a subset of it but not as capable in absolute quality.

About $600 IIRC.

Well, if you have FCP4, DVD Studio Pro 2 and Compressor (along with QuickTime Coversion option when exporting), what's the best way or settings to use to have the greatest quality encoding for a DVD?


I too have noticed blockiness/mozaic in one of the DVD's i burned using Quicktime Coversion at a bitrate of 5.0 (I tried 9.0 but i got a "bitrate too high" error")

Also, how would you burn a project uncompressed?

Sorry, editing noob here.

Anyone?
Moderators?
Adminastators?
A sticky of this would be nice too.

Uncompressed in what way? DV is compressed. MPEG2 etc. are compressed. What is the source of your uncompressed footage? I got my best results in DVD SP 2 using Compressor or Cleaner.

<<<-- Originally posted by Jeff Donald : Uncompressed in what way? DV is compressed. MPEG2 etc. are compressed. What is the source of your uncompressed footage? I got my best results in DVD SP 2 using Compressor or Cleaner. -->>>


I mean like not "further" compressing it anymore.
Like let's say I want to make a small promo or just anything in general, that's been edited in FCP4 and I want to send it to DVD SP2 to make a menu.
I want the quality to be the exactly the same or as great as it can be when the final product is finished.
I've heard of people saying they can burn edited footage to a DVD via DVD SP2, uncompressed.

It would be nice if there was a post, sticky, or something like that, having FCP4, Compressor, and DVD SP2 settings that would give you the maximum quality possible, even if it means it would have to be a shorter length project.

You can obviously put any kind of file on a DVD, but if you want it to play on a standard DVD player, it must meet certain requirements. It must be MPG2 encoded, and the maximum bit rate is about 10 Mbit per second. This is much lower than either DV or HDV compression. There are a number of other MPG2 parameters which must also be met.

TMPGEnc is a very reasonably priced PC MPG encoder, and does an excellent job of encoding - arguably the best. I don't know much about Mac software.