Compressor in FCP does not support H.264 beyond 720p resolution

Question

When trying to export 1080i material from FCP through compressor into H.264 format the resolution box in the Inspector only allows up to 720p. Is there a compressor or FCP update or is this all the compressor will do at this time?

Answer 1

Since the preset you've mentioned is one of the Apple Advanced Format Conversions and NOT one of the HD DVD presets I'm guessing that you are encoding for a Quicktime movie and not a DVD. Any of Apple's included presets can be duplicated and customized - but you need to start with the correct preset. You might also want to consult some sources and review the various HD formats and their parameters. Compressor is capable of converting and encoding a phenomenal number of video formats - it won't prevent you from doing things that don't necessarily make sense (so don't necessarily blame Compressor if you do something that results in dreadful degradation of quality).
There is no reason you can't output a Quicktime movie of your 1080i(50?60?) material using H264 - but whether that output is interlaced or progressive is not a function of H264. If your source material is interlaced, Compressor's Frame Controls can deinterlace it. This is functionality entirely separate from the choice of encoding method (H264). 1080p, however, is more than just deinterlaced 1080i material. 1080i is interlaced video with a frame size of 1440x1080 pixels at a frame rate of either 29.97fps (1080i60) or 25fps (1080i50). 1080p material has a frame size of 1920x1080 pixels and a frame rate of 24 (23.976). You would probably not like the result of a conversion of your 1080i source material to 1080p - the resultant video might be distorted and would no doubt suffer additional image degradation from being scaled up. Retiming of the frame rate isn't going to help either.
I think it unwise to force material not created in 1080p into such a format. You certainly won't "gain" quality. 1080i material is pretty impressive (IMHO), but if you really 'want' 1080p you need a camera that records in 1080p rather than trying to "fake it" in software. If your presentation is intended TV, interlaced source material is the norm (even for most flat screen LCD or plasma HD TVs). If your presentation is intended for computer playback then deinterlacing might be advantageous - but I wouldn't use Compressor's Frame Controls to accomplish this. Compressor's Frame Controls produce very good quality but are agonizingly slow. H264 encoding is very processor intensive and slow - combining it with Frame Controls just makes it worse.