Compressor 2.0.1 and Mpeg2. What to do?

Question

I know this has been discussed to death... I have searched and read alot of posts. I find posts that link to other posts.. that have now dropped off the forum. So it has been a little hard to get a solid idea of where to go from this point. I'm hoping a few of you can chime in here with your opinion on the current capability of compressor for MPEG2 2-pass VBR encoding, and how to achieve acceptable results.
I have had problems encoding 2-pass VBR mpeg2 files. I get blocks that bounce up and down in certain scenes. I have attributed this to the known problems with compressor, and have been using 1-pass CBR at about 7.0mbps. The results are ok but much softer than the original footage on DV Tape.
Is the situation really as bad as it seems with compressor? Should I invest in a different encoder for encoding MPEG2 for DVD, and if so which encoder... and how much am I going to have to spend?
err.. I'm frustrated with the whole thing!
Thanks,
Matt

Answer 1

I get blocks that bounce up and down in certain scenes.
That doesn't sound much like what I'm seeing with Compressor's two-pass VBR. The only unresolved quality-of-image problem I've seen in Compressor 2 is the random occurrence of compression artifacts and these look just like the type of defect that you see when you use a very low bit rate setting (in fact, based upon my analysis with Digigami's MPressionist that's exactly what they are). So, you may select a high-quality 6.2Mbps setting but intermittently and rarely you may see a few frames that look like they were done at 2Mbps (or similar).
Are you sure you aren't seeing the defects that are caused by using Compressor v1.X presets with Compressor 2? That particular problem caused small to medium sized blocks of white or near white to "dance" around in parts of your MPEG2 encodings. This latter problem is avoided by simply removing or not using presets that were created in earlier versions of Compressor (pre-version 2.0). If that could be your problem, refer to the following link from Apple:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?linkprocess_@@.68b5fbd7
As for the two-pass VBR compression artifacts I mentioned earlier, some installations seem to have them while others do not (or the ones that seem not to have the problem just haven't noticed the random artifacts).
In my experience, the degree of problems with two-pass VBR seem to vary from job to job. Some sequences may only be very mildly degraded (or visually unaffected) while others will have obvious and distracting artifacts. I think it may depend upon the nature of the video and the length of your sequences. Of course, those two variables can combine in a number of ways, so you really can't predict what may or may not turn out okay.
To be fair, however, you've got to note that some users seem pretty confident that their systems are free from this problem. Some even claim that Compressor 2 produces better output than did previous versions of the software. I've also read one review that was written by a professional videographer that said that Compressor 2 produced the finest MPEG2 output that he had ever seen (posted on the internet by a commercial, pro-oriented media outlet) . It seems pretty obvious that your so-called mileage may vary.