Motion - Compressor - DVDSP4

Question

Hello everyone,
Hopefully someone here can give me a bit of advice with my situation.
I am making a 45 minute video with 2 animations. One animation is the intro and the second is the outro, with the "video.mov" in the middle.
As in the past I have always brought my animation into FCP and had to deal with the less than great results. (Even after tweaking FCP's project settings)
So, I came up with the idea of doing it backwards. I brought the video into Motion, and assembled it there. Now when I export it looks amazing! I am using the animation codec. The only downfall is that it exports as roughly 70 gigs.
I need to put this on a dvd, dvd or dvd-dl. Let me rephrase that. I need two copys one that will play in a dvd player, and the second should be just a raw format, like mov or something.
I am trying to figure out the best way (preset/settings) to compress both of of these. I have only tried the first copy (playable in a dvd player).
I used the "DVD: best quality 90 minutes" preset, and have come up with less that happy results. This files comes out as a .m2v and .ac3, that is fine but the total size is just under 2 Gb; I have "8" gigs on a dvd-dl. Is there a way to make the quality better.
The way I understand compressor to work is size vs quality. I have lots of free space, how to do I make my video look better?
Now; as for the second part of the question (the raw format). This can be put on its own dvd-dl, what preset should I use to optimize the the best quality?
Thank you for any advice,
Ethan

Answer 1

The problem you'll have with increasing the bit rate too far when encoding a DVD is that some, maybe even most won't be able to play the resulting DVD. There is a little wriggle room with bit rates when encoding to MPEG2, but the size of the DVD is more related to the length of the movie. You can't just crank it up and expect it to play.
Animation codec is not the codec I'd use to export video. Since you didn't explain how you brought Motion animations into FCP, nor how you "tweaked" settings, I can't tell if you've just been doing something wrong or not. There are many places along the chain that can affect quality. However, there are a few things you can do to make things as good as possible:
Export your Motion project in the same codec as your video. It will need to be in that codec to export from FCP anyway, so you can either export it from Motion that way, or render in FCP, but I prefer Motion export.
If you bring the .motn project into FCP, make sure that your sequence settings are set to BEST for Motion Projects and Templates. CMD+0 to get to your sequence settings, then select the render control tab and change the Quality drop down to BEST, and check the setting that says, "Always use best Quality when rendering movies."
As far as your QT goes. Since you only have about 4gb of space on your DVD to fit the file (I'm not sure you can break up a single file onto two layers), I would export a really high quality H.264. Duplicate one of the H.264 presets and change the bit rate to something like 5,000. If the resulting file is only 1GB or so, crank the bit rate up more and re-encode.
Andy