Consistently bad transcode

Hi everyone, I'm having some transcoding issues I was hoping you could help me with.
I have a 30 minute film, shot on 35mm that I'm trying to get onto DVD (and eventually Blu-ray).  I have a DPX sequence of those film scans, which I have transcoded in AE into an Uncompressed Quicktime.  I've imported that Uncompressed Quicktime directly into Encore, and let Encore handle the transcoding to MPEG2 with the default settings.  The DVD includes only a single timeline with the single Quicktime in it.  No menus or anything like that.
The film looks great - as one would hope having shot on 35mm film - but the end-result DVD looks terrible.  It looks very compressy, especially in any shadowy/dark areas.  The movie is a fairly dark supernatural/horror type, and to boot features an entirely black cast.  So these compressy shadows are absolutely killing me.  Also, I'm fairly certain the issue is happening in the QT to MPEG transcoding process, since the Quicktime from the DPX looks great.
Is there any specific transcode settings you could recommend?  Any smarter way to do this in order to get a higher quality image?
Any help you could offer would be so appreciate.  I've worked really really hard on making this film look fantastic, and to loose image quality so drastically on the very last step of the process is making me go crazy.  Thanks!

Leave QuickTime out of it.  There can sometimes be gamma issues using it.
Create an AVI file instead.
If you're adventurous, you might also explore using the free HC Encoder to create the MPEG.  It has more configurability than the included Adobe encoder, and frankly does a better overall job.

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    Well, I've spent about an hour torturing the crop bars in iPhoto, trying to generate any kind of consistent bad behavior. When I first started, I was seeing problems occur about once every couple minutes, but not in any consistent way. I saw the crop frame change shape when nothing was selected and I was just moving the cursor. I saw the cross for corner manipulation track my cursor finger all the way into the center of the frame, even though I was not selecting anything. I saw one or more frame sides jump in or out a quarter inch or more at a time, when nothing was selected. This last was the most common misbehavior for about the first half hour. But the more I honed in on trying to recreate any problem, the less it started happening. I thought perhaps I'm doing something with my fingers on this new trackpad that the software is not interpreting the way I intend it to. I'm pretty sure at this point it's at least partly that, based on the diminishing occurrences as I experienced tonight.
    In the last 15 minutes or so of constantly grabbing and moving corners, dragging the cursor over every part of the frame and photo with and without selecting things, the most I could get was twice when I was moving the cursor without selecting anything, and the whole crop frame shifted less than a quarter inch. I tried quitting iPhoto and restarting it, switching to different photos, and trying the same operation of selecting an area and trying to make it act goofy in a preview image I have up on the desktop. I even walked away for five minutes, rinsed my hands in water so they were nice and cold again, and I still can't get it to fail again. I think I'm done playing with it for tonight, but the next time it does misbehave, I'm going to plug in my usb mouse and see what happens. If it is a library issue, how I select things and control the cursor shouldn't make any difference, should it?
    I've been using my bluetooth mouse on my mac mini (same versions of iPhoto and OS) to edit photos in iPhoto for the last three years, and I've never seen anything like these mis-behaviors.

  • Horrible Nightmare with BT Broadband

    I have had BT Broadband on the same phone number since 2004. It has always been perfect aside from one time I experienced a consistant bad connections. That was dealt swiftly and effectively by tech support in 2006 and aside from that it had been flawless. It probably helped that I am fairly computer savvy (as most on this forum are I suspect) but I was very happy with the service provided. Now just before January I got the email my line was being upgraded to this new 20mb capability type. I only mention this as it is a coincidence that might matter. The day of upgrade came and went and the next night I experienced a disconnection for 15 minutes. Was expecting it - w/ever. My speed noticeably increased following the upgrade and I was happy. A couple of days later the problem started, intermittent disconnections. They would happen maybe once a day very briefly (but enough to potentially cost me a lot of money - will explain later) but they were there. They started happening regularly so I tried changing the microfilter etc, all the usual things. Same thing kept happening. Eventually they just kept coming so I phoned BT tech support and couldnt get through so I used the contact email. 3 days later I got a phone call from someone who had read my email, they said they were going to perform a line test and would get back to me. They hung up the phone and I was never contacted again. Now a month later the disconnections are happening more frequently, several times a day. I phoned BT tech support and got through to india this time. I had the most frustrating phone call with a lady who first of all took 20 attempts to get my phone number and secondly just kept repeating the phrase "I will resolve your problem" over and over. After asking me to do many stupid things, all of which I did for her she said it is probably "browser compatability issues". This was pretty much an insult to my intelligence so I said goodbye and hung up, and filled out the contact email form again instead. Three days later someone from india phoned back to say they had booked an engineer visit for 8am-10m Friday. thats great I said. 4pm Thu engineer turns up. Says thats when he was booked for. Nevermind I say do your stuff. He runs all his tests and reports my line passes everything with flying colours. I agree the connection is great when connected but I am receiving intermittent occasional disconnects. He says he cannot say why but will send his results back to India who will be in touch. Nobody from India calls back, intermittent DC/s still persist. I cannot bear phoning India again and feel noone is wanting to help me so I call for my MAC code (going to move to ZEN - has anyone any experience?). Get told I cant have my MAC code because of a technical problem. Calling back tomorrow utterly frustrated now.
    Sorry for the rant guys it is a killer situation for me and wanted to put my experience with BT in public, anyone got any advice?
    I dont know what to do other than move ISPS to Zen, has anyone any experience with them?
    Disconnects are a major headache for me...I am a professional online poker player and if you are disconnected, even briefly, at online poker then you are treated as folded. I can have put thousands of pounds into a hand but be automatically folded due to a disconnect. I cannot risk this at the moment with these DC/s happening everyday - I cant work either, its a bad situation.
    If It matters I am using the Home hub v2.0 (the black one) Everything has been super solid in my setup till that upgrade a few months ago (although that might be a coincidence)

    Hi BBDefender,
    Sounds pretty frustrating, expecially if its losing you important hands at poker.
    I can have a look into this for you and get the line stabilised.  I would also recommend posting your Hub stats so the rest of the community can have a look as well.
    Could you drop me in an email please with your BT account and telephone number along with a link back to this thread.
    Just send to the email address in my profile and mark FAO Craig please.
    Thx
    Craig
    BTCare Community Mod
    If we have asked you to email us with your details, please make sure you are logged in to the forum, otherwise you will not be able to see our ‘Contact Us’ link within our profiles.
    We are sorry but we are unable to deal with service/account queries via the private message(PM) function so please don't PM your account info, we need to deal with this via our email account :-)”
    td-p/30">Ratings star on the left-hand side of the post.
    If someone answers your question correctly please let other members know by clicking on ’Mark as Accepted Solution’.

  • Need Wireless Printer Recommendation

    I've had consistently bad luck with wireless printers. We have 2 iMacs and 3 MacBooks in my house. I want to buy a good printer that can work with them all wirelessly. HP seems to subscribe to the "printer of the month" idea and don't offer support to older machines. Any ideas would be appreciated.

    Ken,
    HP comes out with new consumer models 1x per year the same as Canon, Epson and most others. They also have the broadest selection of WiFi printers to suit all different types of needs. Without knowing anything about what you really want besides wireless it's tough to recommend. Can you give us an idea of printing habits (photos, email, web pages, spreadsheets), scanning needs, guess of pages per month, do you want to save paper by having duplexing, etc...

  • [SOLVED] Serial port dropping bytes

    I am doing some embedded systems development work and I have an FTDI USB to Serial bridge chip on the board I am working on.  It randomly drops received bytes.  This only happens under Arch linux as I just recently switched from Ubuntu and I had no problems there.  I have the same problem on another computer I use that also runs Arch, though the problem there is much worse.  I'm assuming it's a kernel interrupt priority issue.  I don't really know where to start debugging this, so any input would be much appreciated.  Unfortunately, it's quite random.  Sometimes it's rock solid and sometimes it drops a byte every few hundred or so, causing some rather anoying issues.  Cast in point: it seems to be working fine at the moment but earlier it was wreaking havoc while I was tring to carry out some calibration operations.  The other computer I tried it with is consistently bad, though, getting out of sync almost immediately.  The first computer (usually good performance) has a high end 2nd gen core i7 (sandy bridge) while the second (not so good performance) computer has an intel atom processor.
    Last edited by alex.forencich (2011-09-01 07:07:02)

    The device on the other end is an Atmel xmega microcontroller.  I did not use any flow control when I wrote the firmware as the communication routines in the firmware are very fast as the chip runs at 32 MHz and the USART is interrupt driven.  Since only one byte at a time gets dropped, the chip is definitely receiving and responding to the bytes sent as most of the commands are 3 bytes and the responses are 3 bytes, so more than one byte would get lost if a byte got lost on the way there. 
    As for stty, here are the outputs:
    Arch:
    $ stty -a -F /dev/ttyUSB0
    speed 115200 baud; rows 0; columns 0; line = 0;
    intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>;
    eol2 = <undef>; swtch = <undef>; start = ^Q; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; rprnt = ^R;
    werase = ^W; lnext = ^V; flush = ^O; min = 1; time = 0;
    -parenb -parodd cs8 -hupcl -cstopb cread clocal -crtscts
    -ignbrk -brkint -ignpar -parmrk -inpck -istrip -inlcr -igncr icrnl ixon -ixoff
    -iuclc -ixany -imaxbel -iutf8
    -opost -olcuc -ocrnl -onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0 bs0 vt0 ff0
    -isig -icanon -iexten -echo -echoe -echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase -tostop -echoprt
    -echoctl -echoke
    Ubuntu:
    $ stty -a -F /dev/ttyUSB0
    speed 115200 baud; rows 0; columns 0; line = 0;
    intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^A; eol = <undef>;
    eol2 = <undef>; swtch = <undef>; start = ^Q; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; rprnt = ^R;
    werase = ^W; lnext = ^V; flush = ^O; min = 1; time = 0;
    -parenb -parodd cs8 hupcl -cstopb cread -clocal -crtscts
    -ignbrk -brkint -ignpar -parmrk -inpck -istrip -inlcr -igncr -icrnl -ixon -ixoff
    -iuclc -ixany -imaxbel -iutf8
    -opost -olcuc -ocrnl -onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0 bs0 vt0 ff0
    -isig -icanon -iexten -echo -echoe -echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase -tostop -echoprt
    -echoctl -echoke
    Differences: eof (^D vs ^A), hupcl, clocal, icrnl, and ixon
    Here is the output of my PC side software when a byte is lost:
    Write: 52 01 00
    Write: 52 01 04
    Write: 52 01 01
    Write: 52 01 02
    Write: 52 01 22
    Write: 52 01 20
    Write: 52 01 26
    Write: 52 01 27
    Write: 52 01 29
    Write: 52 01 2a
    Read: 00 01 06 00 00 06 00 01 06 00 01
    Read from 0100 complete (data: 0001, response 06)
    Read from 0104 complete (data: 0000, response 06)
    Read from 0101 complete (data: 0001, response 06)
    Read: 06 07 fa 06 07 d0 06 ff 74 06 ff 83
    Read from 0102 complete (data: 0001, response 06)
    Read from 0122 complete (data: 07fa, response 06)
    Read from 0120 complete (data: 07d0, response 06)
    Read from 0126 complete (data: ff74, response 06)
    Read: 06 12 f0 06 26 bd 06
    Read from 0127 complete (data: ff83, response 06)
    Read from 0129 complete (data: 12f0, response 06)
    Read from 012a complete (data: 26bd, response 06)
    Write: 52 01 00
    Write: 52 01 04
    Write: 52 01 01
    Write: 52 01 02
    Write: 52 01 22
    Write: 52 01 20
    Write: 52 01 26
    Write: 52 01 27
    Write: 52 01 29
    Write: 52 01 2a
    Read: 00 01 06
    Read from 0100 complete (data: 0001, response 06)
    Read: 00 00 06 00 01 06 00 01 06 07 f7
    Read from 0104 complete (data: 0000, response 06)
    Read from 0101 complete (data: 0001, response 06)
    Read from 0102 complete (data: 0001, response 06)
    Read: 06 07 d0 06 ff 72 06 ff 7e 06 04 06 26 bd 06
    Read from 0122 complete (data: 07f7, response 06)
    Read from 0120 complete (data: 07d0, response 06)
    Read from 0126 complete (data: ff72, response 06)
    Read from 0127 complete (data: ff7e, response 06)
    Read from 0129 complete (data: 0406, response 26)
    There are two blocks of register reads in the above section.  The first is correct, the second has a mising byte.  The numbers are all in hex.  The response to 51 01 29 comes back the first time (correctly) as 12 f0 06 but the second time as 04 06.  Now, this is a readback value of a power rail voltage, so it fluctuates a bit.  As a result, I don't know what was sent to produce the invalid readback of 04 06.  I will try to get some more debugging information out of the board.  Also, after some further testing, it seems to like to fail in exactly the same manner - same bad response to the same command.  I was getting failures on a different command earlier, but I'm having trouble reproducing that now.  I wonder if two bytes are getting replaced by 04.  According to the ASCII table, 04 (^D) is the control character for End of Transmission.

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