Re: Odd Compressor Problem

I captured some 1080p24 material to hard drive and converted the footage using the "HV20 HDV 24p to ProRes 24p" workflow. All that went fine. Finished the editing and was encoding a 6 minute clip using the H.264 @6.75 Mbps in Compressor. The time-to-complete indicator suggested my little 6 min clip was going to take an incredible 8 hours to complete! Can this be right?
(2 Ghz G5x2; 3GB ram; 10.5.2)

Anyway, since I had unfortunately submitted this via FCP 6 during work hours, I determined about 2 hrs into this that I needed to stop the process and re-submit later. So I did. And now to the problem: When I returned to FCP the last 3/4 of my sequence had lost its picture thumbnails and they had been replaced with black and red thumbnails with white writing on them. They look a bit like the "disconnected media" warnings, but they are unreadable. If I blow them up, they just get blurry. The problem appears to be with clips in the bin, because an earlier edit duplicate sequence shows the same black and red thumbnails, however the original media clips are still in their bin and they are still tagged with the ProRes 24p codec. The clips also read fine in the canvas. The sequence exports to QT movie just fine, but when I tried to resubmit the sequence for H.264 it failed every time.

Today, following a crash of FCP and compressor, the thumbnails are again pictures! What the @%*@?? I am going to post this anyway, because all of this seems very odd. I would still like to know if the time-to-complete seems excessive to the more experienced out there. Is there a better route to HD DVD than the one I'm using?
Thanks.

Hi Bill,

When you work in a ProRes timeline there is absolutely no advantage for you to send to Compressor from the FCP timeline. Just make an independent QT movie (NOT using QT conversion, just a QT movie using current settings) from your project and import this in Compressor. You will win a considerable amount of time and quality will be exactly the same.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Thanks, everyone. I was able to code the material to H.264 and as I mentioned, my timeline icons mysteriously reappeared after FCP crashed. I did read Rick Young's great article on Hi-def DVDs. Unfortunately, I had already encoded my material using the H.264 90 min. setting (@ 6.75 Mbps). The resulting DVD has a stammered look. Action flows, then briefly slows, then speeds, but the picture is stunning! I assume the higher bit rate will fix this?
Two other things I noticed using Rick's directions. The DVD log indicates "formatting as std. DVD" --is this correct? Secondly, the info box shows the media is "QT H 264 video, 1920 x 1080, but frame rate is shown as "29.97 non-drop" --despite this being 24p source material and the H 264 codec indicating "100% source" for frame rate. Not sure what to make of this.

Thanks again everyone, learned a lot today.

To continue: I have imported my HDV 24p to ProRes 24p clips into FCP 6, edited the material then exported as a self-contained QT movie. The movie was fed to Compressor and excreted in three different formats: H.264 90 min, H.264 60 min, and H.264 60 min with the frame rate custom set to 23.976. NONE, I repeat none of these clips works correctly when imported into DVD Studio Pro 4. To be sure, the QT movie works fine, but not the H.264, which has serious motion problems, even on the simulator and even with the "best motion" setting. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Thanks,
Bill

Hi Bill,

Wronge codec. We don't use H.264 to produce SD DVDs.

We use MPEG 2 and Dolby (AC3) audio.

--ken

Hi, Ken
I realize that, but I was following Rick Young's white paper on "Creating Hi-def DVDs using 4.7GB Type 5 DVDs" which does use the H.264 codec. I agree that the results with H.264 are vastly superior to MPEG-2 in picture quality, I just can't get the motion right. The clips don't play correctly whether transcoded from FCP QT movie or the original ProRes 24p files. Can't figure this one out....
Bill

Hi Bill,

Did not know that you were trying to make a HD DVD (Toshiba).

How are you going to Compressor? Have you tryied it this way?

File > Export > QT (Not with Conversion). Make Self Contained, Use Current Settings, Do Not Recompress all frames.

Drop the QT export into Compressor.

--ken

Yes, I did try that as well as converting directly from FCP to Compressor --motion on the clip is screwy either way. I am beginning to wonder if the ProRes 422 (24 fps) to H.264 is just not workable. Rick's protocol doesn't stipulate the codec on the original FCP sequence, nor the fps. I did notice that I could import one of the original ProRes 422 clips into DVD SP and install it on a track and it worked fine. I also tried your protocol for HDV to std def DVD and that worked great also --for a std. DVD.
Oh well.....

Far as the icons in the timeline, i have that issue sometimes as well. I just quit FCP, trash my Thumbnail Cache Files, you can find out where FCP stores them by looking in System Settings, under the "Final Cut Pro" menu (mine are within Home>Documents>Final Cut Pro Documents)