In a little bit of a Pickle
 

Hey guys, I have a file here that I need to export from FCP to Compressor, to be burned onto a DVD. The issue that I am having is that the video in question was shot in 720p60 and I need to now what would be the best method to get the best quality picture after compression etc etc.
thanks!

Edit: My inital compression that I am not happy with is MPEG-2 5.0mbps 1 pass.m2v

Briefly downscale using mpeg streamclip Prores with the high quality scaler switched on.
If you want to go with progressive at 25fps then just throw it in compressor and it will discard every second frame and encode to mpeg 2. If your the patient type, you can use compressor to downscale, but to get reasonable quality you need to have the frame controls on and set to the best settings.
If you want to go with interlaced then you can use a little freebie called JES interlacer to take each of the frames and convert them into fields giving you a very nice interlaced Prores file that can be encoded to mpeg 2 using your favourite encoder.

regards
Ian Skurrie

The quality of Compressors rescaler (when set to best quality) is better than mpeg streamclips.
Compressor also can convert progressive to interlaced (60p->60i). Just choose under frame controls to output interlaced (and select 29.97fps under the video-settings of quicktime, if the output-format is quicktime).

Thanks for the tip Dominik ... much more flexible and (I think) much more straightforward than JES Deinterlacer.

Cheers
Andy

Stephen,

From my pro-video review site here's a page about best-settings to use for Compressor to give you either the "best of the best" or one notch down, depending on how patient you can be:

Grumpy Quail: Best Apple Compressor Settings for DVD Widescreen Downconversions

Just wanted to send a quick Thank You! to Robert for this link. I'm fairly adept with Compressor, but never knew that I could significantly alter the settings for DVD production. Great information!

Josh

Your suggested settings are no good, they cause the "3x Crash Host" error and the encoding never even finishes. I think the problem is the Anti-Alias being set to 6. If it's set to 0, it doesn't crash.

Your Qmaster is crashing not the Compressor settings. Always export a self-contained QuickTime movie of your project first before launching a render cluster. There is a bug where the computer tries to render the filters and effects in the sequence on top of the render cluster which is already eating up most of the processor services. Rendering in FCP doesn't help as Compressor always re-renders files while compressing. A self-contained movie is a straight-forward render in Qmaster and doesn't jam the processors.

Well the compressor settings control Qmaster.

I just tried a small self-contained movie, and Robert's settings still crash if Anti-Aliasing is above 0.

They also produce absolutely horrible output. Are those settings for 720p input or 1080i?

Compressor does not control Qmaster. The segment settings are determined by how the QuickCluster is configured. This is very dependent on how much memory you have. Less than 8gbs of RAM works better with 2 instances selected in QuickCluster. That's what I learned with my 2.26 8-core MacPro with the stock 6gbs RAM. Four instances worked occasionally but sometimes I got the 3x Crash Host error. Once I dropped down to 2 instances, the error ceased. Two months ago I increased the memory to 10gbs, I also increased the instances to 4 and all has been well. So far.

I followed the differing QuickCluster settings found here and elsewhere on the web but they all differ in some way and it was only by experimenting on my own that I found a stabile configuration for my model of Mac. You should be able to get this error out by a little tweaking.

Good point, mine may be running out of memory (I only have 8GB).