Not wrong - just one crucial thing left out:

In Compressor, click on the Frame Controls tab, click the dark grey gear icon and select Frame Controls to 'On' in the pop-up. That's it. No need to change what's set already.

This enables the high quality scaling from Shake, and if you feed it 720p50, it will re-interlace it to 50i for you.

That's it. That's the magic sauce.

If you don't use Frame Controls, you're using the rather iffy scaling, and you'll get lumpy edges. As seen in the website.

BTW, I always export a self contained movie from FCP and compress from there. Lots of good reasons for this. I also tend to stick with the EX format from shoot to export, then compress or encode to the desired format. I've tried but not needed (yet) a ProRes workflow.

Exactly. If you're mainly publishing for SD, with only a vain hope of lasting out to HD in the not so distant future, 720p is the way to go. And avoid that nasty interlace stuff!

Not sure what you mean by "vain hope", but yes, I would love to produce everything in Full HD on Blu-Ray, but the market is not big enough for specialist DVDs using Blu-Ray.

Not by choice, I will still have to produce SD DVDs for the forseeable future.

There's a couple of points to my vain hope of an HD future within European corporate video:

- Most UK punters are quite happy with DVD players that up-rez progressive material to HD screens

- When viewing HD at DOMESTIC viewing distances (had better preface that with European), BBC research demonstrated that most viewers with screens 42" and under are not going to fully benefit from 1080 and that 720 was sufficient.

- I've been creating video in 720p in WMV format for quite some time now, for use as a movie played back in PowerPoint and projected on high end equipment or displayed on good quality monitor panels. 1080 is still too much for most PCs.

- The price difference, non-rippability and smaller library of Blu-Ray over DVD isn't exactly helping the HD market. With my consumer hat on, and a few blu-ray titles on my shelf, I'm still liable to buy DVDs over BDs.

- In the UK, HD broadcasting does look better than Terrestrial Digital broadcasts, mainly because of the low bitrate and aggressive compression employed here in the UK. But DVD playback and upscaling of well compressed movies can fool most eyes.

- Most of my audience have DVD players in their PCs now (some corporate models are still hobbled). There is zero penetration of BD players. In event video, there's no desire to move up to HD.

So I will continue to shoot in 720p and deliver the occasional stunning WMV movie that makes people's jaws drop for a modest premium whilst accepting it's a SD world still (abeit 16:9). 1080 raw footage doesn't seem to downconvert as well or as quickly, and currently has very little to show it on. Nobody wants it, even at an SD price.

Hence the 'vain' hope of HD.

In Compressor, click on the Frame Controls tab, click the dark grey gear icon and select Frame Controls to 'On' in the pop-up. That's it. No need to change what's set already.

This enables the high quality scaling from Shake, and if you feed it 720p50, it will re-interlace it to 50i for you.

====================
Matt,

It seems safe to assume that here in NTSC land I would get the same results shooting in 720p/60 and downconverting to SD.

I use Vegas and not FCP, but I think you are saying one should render to 60i. Is that right?

John

Hi again,

Regarding the Exporting as a Quicktime Self Contained movie, I can't seem to get the thing to export in 16:9! It only exports onto the desktop in 4:3.

If I open the self contained movie up in fcp it plays in 16:9. I remember having this problem before which is probably why I declined the self contained route!

Any ideas????

Export the file as Square Pixels, or open the 4:3 aspect movie in QuickTime Pro and set the width to 133% and save the file. The movie will now play back as 16:9 every time.

Right, firstly: If we're talking PAL SD, even though we view it in 16:9, it still is, actually, really deep down, a 4:3 squished image which your display device stretches out to fill. There's no more pixels in a 16:9 anamorphic video than there is in a 4:3 video - just a different shape.

Older versions of QuickTime and FCP (sorry, can't be exact, my system is up to date* and doesn't do this any more) would 'do the right thing' even if it was the wrong thing, and QT would wrongly report the vertical pixel count assuming the horizontal pixel count and aspect ratio were square 4:3. That little bug is now squashed and Compressor just got on with things because it was just QT trying to be helpful. The actual data wasn't changed.

But hold the phone. If you're editing XDCAM-EX footage, the pixels ARE square. There is no such thing as 'Anamorphic' in these cases. The only situation would be with HDV 1080 footage which is actually 1440x1080, not 1920x1080.

In the years I've been around FCP people, I've heard talk of sync issues, occasional render-not-updated issues, blips of the 'media not found' red screen and longer processing times with exporting to Compressor direct from FCP - all for the privilege of processing effects in ProRes or something. As I invariably work to deadlines, I go with the reliable separate movie rather than wring the last few drops of goodness that will be lost in downconvert or compression anyway. That's just my workflow. (shrug)

And it frees up my Mac so I can actually do more editing whilst that self contained movie compresses in the background. Great when you need to do multiple versions as the deadline looms.

So, I'd have to say with 6.0.3, 10.5.6 and QT 7.6 I'm not having any apect ratio wobblies - and that includes PAL SD.

* And when I say 'up to date' I mean as far as is stable and I've not updated to the latest software update yet. That would be courting disaster!