workaround for my horrible compression?

[sunchaser]

hello,

i'm trying to find a workaround for a major problem i'm having with compression.

my picture looks fine but i'm having a serious problem with my title sequence. I animated the sequence in after effects: a light illuminates text and casts a shadow. the light fades on an then off. when compressed in CCE the gradient from the light part of the screne to the dark part of the screen is very pixilated. instead of being a smooth gradient, the illumination is made up of thick rings of different colors. it looks even worse when they move.

i'm wondering if i can export a series of jpeg pictures and make a movie out of them in scenarist and then have the rest of my mpeg2 movie follow it. would that work to make my lighing fx smooth?

do you have any other suggestions?
thanks
max

[oddyseus]

all depends at the export resolution of the avi and the encoding settings of CCE.

Provide us with more details to figure the problem out.

[sunchaser]

hey,
i exported the movie as a qt ref from avid.

i've tried the highest bit rates possible, cbr and vbr, i've tried the normal animation and computer grafics quality settings, someone recomended i try a higher quantization bit rate, i tried that and it didn't work. i also tried fooling around with the bit allocation, to make the title sequence as lightly compressed as possible. it seems to me that mpeg2 can't deal with moving gradients very well, unless someone else has a suggestion.

so, is it possible to ipmort a sequence of jpegs into scenarist and make a movie of them there, instead of being stuck with this mpeg2 movie of the title sequence?

thanks,
chaser

[Black Hole]

Well, you didn't tell us exactly the bitrate used in the sequence. I wouldn't go below an average of 6500 or 7000 kbps for that kind of graphics (assuming you're using VBR with 8500 or 9000 as maximum) ... and yes, gradients are very tough for MPEG-2: even in commercial Hollywood movies you can notice pixelation in sky landscapes.

[oddyseus]

U cn try exporting to mpeg2 using only I frames at 9000kbs CBR. It should fix your problem.

[sunchaser]

black hole - i tried using 9.8 as the max and min and average and it didn't help.

oddyseus- thanks for the suggestion. i tried all i frames with 9.8 as the max and average and it didn't help at all it seemed.



so, back to the original question. what about building a sequence of jpg's in scenarist. is this possible? could i make a slide show of jpg at the approximate frame rate or something? you guys ever tried this?

[oddyseus]

No I dont think anyone tried it or even being possible to do it.

U can put a number of stills to play in sequence but you can't make them 1 frame long. The minimum allowed length of a still is 12 frames. So if u try it you will moving in 12 frames stills.

[sunchaser]

BREAKING NEWS
BREAKING NEWS

hey guys,
so i discovered that the problem lies in compressing my titles after they've been imported and exported with avid.

when i compress the original movie file that i created in AE, it looks great!

so, now the question is, how do i link these two mpeg2 files in scenarist. i'm am a novice. i've figured out the letterbox menue's and chapter points, but i'm not sure about this.

i have a mpeg2 of my whole movie including the titles which is linked to its aiff file. is there a way to cut out the titles of this mpeg2 and replace them with the AE mpeg2 version?

how would i go about doing this?

[Black Hole]

Well, it's been a lot of time since your last post, I hope you already fixed it. Now you realize that Avid is not lossless and it introduces artifacts in the video. If you only work with QT, sometimes Animation codec is useful ... if you can afford 60 GB/hour. There is a good comparison of QT uncompressed codecs in this page (http://codecs.onerivermedia.com/index.htm) but there isn't still a good lossless codec for QuickTime like HuffYUV for AVI files, at least not one available in both worlds PC & Macintosh.

Anyway, I haven't used Scenarist, just DVD Maestro. Joining MPEG2 files there is as simple as dragging both assets one after another. Splitting is more tough because you can't manually set the beginning point, and you must use the max zoom to frame basis in order to slide the beginning of the damn video. :mad:

There is a good tool called M2-Edit Pro 5.0 (http://www.mediaware.com.au/M2-edit.html) that can be used as a MPEG editor, but it costs $1495 :eek:

[sunchaser]

thanks black hole. i havn't fixed the problem yet. it turns out that scenarist can't play the two clips smoothly together, there's always a little blip in the music.

i tried importing the movie into my ae file and rendering the title and the movie with QT animation, this was the only way to get the good quality title in the same movie file as the movie - but it seemed to be about 80 gigs an hour, i don't have space for that. so i guess the only thing to do would be joining the movies with an mpeg editor but...

about your post though - does final cut pro use lossy compression? it used QT files right?

[sunchaser]

i'm testing a program called mpeg2vcr which is supposed to be able to exit mpeg2.

i joined my two movie file in this program but then it has to make a whole new mpeg2. so its re-encoding my two mpeg files. i suspect that this is going to ruin the title and maybe make the movie look worse and it'll take a whole night to encode.

is this how all mpeg editors work? if they re-encode the mpeg2 again, it seems like you'd always get horribly lossy results.

[oddyseus]

Vitec Mpg2Pro and M2-Edit Pro as blackhole suggested r joining the video without re-encoding. I bet there r other editors out there that don't reencode.