Today’s entry is going to discuss a few things about publishing your movies to DVD. At GShutter Studios we use Mac Systems running Final Cut Pro Studio 2 which comes with all the tools and utilities you need to build your DVD’s, so we’re going to stick to discussing those. Keep in mind though that most of the discussion covers details that should apply to other editing systems, so hopefully you’ll find something here of interest.
The first step in any production is getting the film off your camera and into your editing system. While we’re not going to be covering all the details of that step, it is important that you learn as much about your editing system as possible in order to get as clean an image as possible from the camera. For final Cut Pro I’ve found that converting my sequences that I plan to dump to DVD, to 8 bit uncompressed, yields a little more quality to the end result. This can be done in the Sequence / Settings menu and changing the Codec which usually will say DV…NTSC, to 8 bit uncompressed. Keep in mind this will make your final MOV file much larger, but you only need it for the few minutes it takes to build your mpeg2 files.
The next step is to click File / Export / Quicktime movie. If you like, you can choose to create a self contained movie but I generally don’t do this. Since I have Final Cut on the system that I’m going to later be compressing with, I don’t need the larger files required to make a self contained movie. However, if you plan to use a different machine that doesn’t have Final Cut Pro to compress with, then you’ll need the self contained option checked.
Next we’re going to go into Compressor to create our mpeg2 files that we’ll use on the DVD. While its entirely possible to just import the mov file into your DVD editing system, its almost always not a good idea. The DVD programs that I’ve seen normally do the simplest thing possible to get you a DVD without regard for quality. Using an external compression program will allow you to tweak things to get them as perfect as you like.
Compressor ships with presets for DVD and you’ll most likely not want to use any of them. While they are almost always better than letting the DVD program build the files, they aren’t much better. So we’ll make a Copy of them and modify the new Custom entry to our liking.
First an explanation: Most mpeg2 processes are going to include a 2.2 Gamma modification in order to insure the movie is light enough to see on the TV. However, depending on your post work you did, this might be something that really jacks up your final production. While some compressor programs will allow you to turn this feature off, some like Compressor do not. However, Compressor allows you to add a filter to the preset, that you can use to offset the Gamma changes, thereby negating them. To do this go to the filter tab of the preset and click the checkbox beside Gamma. You may have to scroll down to find it.
Once checked you can apply a setting of about 1.1 or 1.2 to help offset that automatically applied setting. However, doing this may cause your contrast to be a bit flat, so after testing, you may want to add a bit of contrast back into the images. This can also be done on the filters tab and you’ll have to play around with it to get it to your liking.
One HUGE note: Make sure you NEVER test your DVD footage using Quicktime, or even the DVD Studio Pro’s simulate screens. Both of these programs seem to reverse the 2.2 Gamma increase on their own and as a result won’t show you a good example of the final footage. I usually use DVDSP to build a set of DVD files that I’ll then test using DVD Viewer on the Mac. This will generally show you a pretty close example of what your TV will look like. While its not perfect it will at least let you tweak things more quickly without having to build multiple DVD copies.
Well, I realize thats a 10,000 foot view of a pretty complex issue, but its probably the most important part of getting a high quality final production done, so if nothing else, I hope you learned that you need to learn your tools completely if you hope to produce high quality films in the future.
Lastly, here are a few images taken from a clip that caused problems. Each image has a label to describe how it was compressed and you can see for yourself how much better you can make the image look, just by applying some basic knowledge of the final compression stage.
Click here to view the images
-glenn hancock