I mean, I guess it's called URGENT

RubberShoes

RubberShoes

macrumors regular
While it's only 2AM here, I need to be up at 6 so I'd like to avoid another all nighter and simply get this job done.

FCP 6= music video filmed entirely on a crappy 4:3 DV probably 10 year old miniDV cam.

FCP = awesome editing tool, sucks when your crap sucks, but pretty good at doing everything

FCP = DV output = WTF!?!?!?

I've never seen such horrible quality. I have tried a simple full export, quicktime conversion using DV stream, QT mov, and I think another one.

Used Compressor, ProResHQ and ProRes creates a 1.5GB file that rivals quality of the crap I was getting earlier. DV/DVCPRO (I think that's its name, I apologize for any error) creates basically the same thing.

No matter how many times or different ways I try exporting this file, it never looks close to ANYTHING like the playback through FCP itself.

I know DV sucks, I hate it personally, didn't have a choice, but is there something I'm missing or any trick or format I can try to get as close as I can to the native image quality!?

Even the native export gives me very choppy and pixelated results, without any resemblence to the range of blacks and whites, it looks terrible!

Please, any advice, big or small, would be greatly appreciated

Thanks!
 
What are you ultimately trying to do? Export for the Web? Make a DVD? Get it back to DV tape? Create a high quality copy for the client?


Lethal
 
I am so sorry, it's for a DVD and to eventually end up on YouTube

I finally figured it out using the 8-bit compressor, for some reason that was better quality than the 10, running it through some other things but I basically figured it out. Sorry about bothering!
 
The quality will never be better than the source quality. That's the nature of video editing; garbage in = garbage out (GIGO).

If DVD is your delivery method, in FCP,, export a QuickTime Movie (File->Export->QuickTime Movie). Do NOT use QuickTime Conversion.

You can make the export self-contained or a reference movie and include chapter markers if needed.

Use the resulting file in Compressor. Choose the appropriate DVD preset, based on the duration of your program. Compressor will create an MPEG-2 (.m2v) video file and a Dolby Digital (AC3) audio file.

Import those two files into DVD Studio Pro for authoring and burning.

-DH
 
Also note that when dealing with DV NTSC footage, FCP makes automatic pixel aspect ratio adjustments so that the material looks correct in the Viewer/Canvas. But when you view those files in QT, it won't look the same because it displays everything in square pixels.

-DH is giving good advice for the DVD workflow, but for your eventual YouTube output, you'll also have to make some processing and scaling adjustments in Compressor to make the video look right when viewed on a computer.

For DV NTSC video recorded in 16:9, you would want to scale to 640x360 (or 720x404) to preserve a 16:9 aspect ratio on output. For 4:3, 640x480 (or 720x540) works well. In both scenarios, you'll also want to de-interlace the video to avoid artifacts. H.264 at about 3.5Mbps works pretty well for YouTube SD. And obviously, you want to create this using the DV QT movie you output from the timeline, not the DVD audio/video files.

Good luck!
 
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