H.264 transcoding broken in 10.5.2?

I'm working on an iDVD7 project containing five movie clips, with menus (using a 6.0 theme). My video clips are all edited and exported from iMovie 7.1.1, using Quicktime export to h.264 encoded .mov files. My last work copy burn on 10.5.1 was made at the end of january on my MBP, using High Quality on a single layer DVD. This worked fine.
Since then I upgraded to 10.5.2, and having made final corrections to the clips and menus I was ready to burn my DVD master. But! Upon completion, all the newly updated clips were jerky, dropping frames all over the place. I then tried erasing all the media files, and chose Professional Quality instead. Same result. As an experiment I tried tons of different qualities on the iMovie h.264 exports, ending up with the same results.
Transcoding one of the h.264 clips to MPEG2 in VisualHub left me with the same stuttery result.
Finally tried exporting to a .mov with MPEG4 encoding from iMovie instead. This transcoded fine with VisualHub.
Today, I tried this burn on my girlfriend's iMac G5 instead, since it's on 10.4.11. Using the original h.264 .movs that wouldn't work on my MBP, the DVD burned fine (but took almost 11 hours instead of four and a half :>)
So is this JUST ME or is this a very dumb 10.5.2 bug?
Message was edited by: Hyoushi

I'm a professional videographer/editor, and I've got the same problem, even with my pro-apps:
I've got 720p footage edited in Final Cut Pro 6, encoded in h.264 with compressor, and tried to burn it to a Standard Def. DVD with just iDVD, and it worked but ended up all jerky - looked like 10-15fps! Tried different settings and tried transcoding it back to DV with Compressor to see if iDVD would play nice with it then, but no love.
Doing it here on a Mac Pro 8-Core 3.0ghz, 4GB, couple TB's of of space spread among RAID...

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thailair wrote:
.... but is the video quality of h.264 better than ProRes 422? FCP X converts it to the latter, right?
usually I don't participate in any 'quality' debate ...
your h264 source looks good - on playback.
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10.Rick Gerard,
Nov 22, 2012 6:07 AM in reply to espedg
Report
In every version of AE that has been capable of exporting h.264 the quality has been significantly lower than exporting with an app that gives you the option of multi-pass rendering. This has always been true for MPEG codecs that use inter frame (temporal) compression. You just can't get the same quality without multi pass compression. This goes back to the first use of MPEG streams.
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It won't let me post the video in the forum, so here is a link to it in dropbox.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k4nz8mg18p4thzd/Mountain%203.AVI?n=145237283
Accessed the file at dropbox. Played the DropBox "display" file in scripted player, played the same resource file using the Safari plug-in, and then downloaded the resource file using the QT 7 Pro "Open URL" option only to learn that this file was an H.264 transcode and not your original file. Used the DropBox download option to download the original Motion JPEG file in AVI file container. File plays as is in both QT X v10.2 and QT 7 v7.6.6 players under Mountain Lion v10.8.4 on my system.
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I fear iMovie 08 transcodes and scales even if I don't want it to...
Can someone verify a way to edit DV streams and then exporting them with unaltered resolution?
Message was edited by: Wender.

H.264 transcoding broken in 10.5.2?

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