Compressor problems.
 

I have recently upgrading to Snow Leopard and FC7. I took screenshots of all of my FC, Compressor and DVD Studio settings so that I would be sure to get the same results. Well, I'm not.
I'm capturing HDV as ProRes 422, editing in FC, exporting a reference file to Compressor and then using the 2 hour DVD setting. I'm getting some weird results. Take a look at the file and please give me your thoughts. You will really notice it in the 2nd shot with the flowers.

http://www.chaddyleproductions.com/v...receremony.mov

The problems I see are image-tear due to the interlaced format which doesn't handle speed changes very well especially with horizontal movement.

The default settings in Compressor won't compensate for this image-tear, you have to de-interlace your footage for this to not be an issue; you can either do this on the timeline (which would be preferred since you've made some speed changes to the clips) or have Compressor do it during the encoding.

Basically you're going to have to bump up the motion processing and de-interlacing quality options in Compressor; this will drastically increase encoding times but it's the only way to deal with interlaced motion-tearing.

In the old version of Compressor, I would bring in the reference movie and change it to Progressive and it worked perfectly. I just left it along as "top first" and the video came out fine. I'm not sure what happened there.

Compressor 3.5 has some serious issues. I was getting great Mpeg-2 encoding results for DVD authoring from EX1 footage with previous version of Compressor. Have tried numerous settings in 3.5 but all looks like crap.

There are many similar stories on Apple discussions:

Apple - Support - Discussions - bad quality issue in compressor 3, much ...

Hopefully there will be a fix soon .. annoying when they advertise improvements & you get this!

It would seem the problem is limited to HDV interlaced footage being downscaled to SD for DVD.

TonyTang from Apple discussions has posted a temporary workaround copied here:

>>>"I'm experiencing similar interlacing / field ordering issues. I've opened a case with Apple and they were able to reproduce my issue. Hopefully this means that their software engineers will soon be working on a fix. I started with an HDV1080i60 sequence and tried to use Compressor to downsize and transcode it to MPEG-2 SD for DVD using the Share... DVD preset. I got terrible flickering in the output MPEG-2 file.

I found that a temporary workaround that worked for me:

1. Open your sequence in Final Cut Pro
2. Click Sequence menu, click Settings...
3. Click Field Dominance, click None (normally it should be set to Upper Odd for HDV interlaced sequences), click OK. In theory, Final Cut will try to play and render the sequence as progressive video.
4. Click File, click Share...
5. Select a Destination folder like Desktop
6. Choose the DVD preset
7. Click Send to Compressor (or click Export)
8. In Compressor, click Submit, click OK

The resulting MPEG-2 using the above steps was much sharper and cleaner and without stair stepping aliasing artifacts resulting from incorrect field ordering.

Note that this issue looks suspiciously similar to a previously known issue in Compressor 2 (see Compressor 2: Field order reversed when transcoding HDV to MPEG-2). Looks like the same bug crept into Compressor 3.5.

Hopefully the workaround steps above also work for anyone else experiencing this issue.

If you are experiencing this issue, then please report it. You can call Apple with your Support ID included with Final Cut Studio: 1-800-APL-CARE (1-800-275-2273). The more people who report it, the higher priority and attention it will get. And hopefully it will be fixed ASAP."<<<

Episode Encoder does not suffer from this problem so if you have a copy or know someone that does you can still get better-than-compressor output on Snow Leopard until Apple fixes Compressor. Again.

The problem is not limited to interlaced HDV footage. The work around mentioned in previous post unfortunately does not work with XDCAM progressive 1080p25 35mbs footage.