Compressor adds digital artifacts on cross dissolves

Same problem for me. The most recent "fix" has NOT fixed this problem with compressor and it's been this way for MONTHS!!!

I export a QT movie from FCP and then let QT-7 Pro make my MV2 files. No artifacts seen using this method... (though I feel the quality might be slightly less...)

I'm glad i found this post. I have spent all night trying to find out why this has started to happen to me all of a sudden. I can nail it down to a compressor problem though. I'm exported to DVD high quality NTSC and have the same digital artifacts. More to the point, they get worse the further down the timeline in my peice.

I'm going to try exporting a self contained movie and have DVDSP do the encoding. I will post back on what results I get.

Update. Rendered out a full frame QT file from FCP and all was well. Used DVDSP4 to encode it and the artifacts came back. As of right now I cannot make a DVD as these poor quality transitions are ruining my work.

Hi Graham
Many of us have suffered this problem over the last few months and yet many others are reporting no problems.
My workaround, without going to a non-Apple product is to use QT Pro 7 or go back to Compressor 1.2.1. I have stuck with using QT for the moment.
Hope this helps until Apple recognise that some users are having problems.

Alot of people are having problems with artifacts, its been suggested that it could be a problem with the VBR scanner. IE and actual Bug in Compressor.

The best workaround I've found (thanks to Waymen on here) is to use one pass CBR and set the bitrate yourself.

see Richard Russell4, "GOP settings?", 11:00am Oct 3, 2005 CDT

for a full description!

FWIW....I did some more testing at my end on this subject as it was causing me no end of problems. I took the same FCP file and exported using both a VBR and CBR export and the VBR file introduced a ton of digital artifacts but the CBR file was clean.

I concur through my testing that there definatley seems to be a problem with the VBR scanner as it happens in both compressor and DVDSP. I was hoping the recent tiger update would fix this but it has not....not at my end anyway.

Simon,

The compression marker scenario makes sense because it forces an I Frame at that spot, but you're right to imply that having to put 30 markers across a dissovle is not a good solution. What's interesting though, is that FCP (theoretically) places Compression Markers at every edit point, even ones with transitions applied, so the fact that you got a clean frame where you manually placed one in an area that was already supposed to have one causes some concern, above the issues you are experiencing.

Just a thought, have you adjusted your Motion Estimation settings in the Quality Tab at all?

Brian Gary
Author, "Art of Encoding Using Compressor"

Yes, I had all the same problems. It seems Compressor's VBR feature is whacked. I dropped a 40 minute quicktime into compressor created a new preset and mpeg2'd it at 1 pass, 7.2 bitrate, motion estimator BEST, segmenting off, and just to be safe, use the same settings is DVDSP when you build the DVD. And just to make it easier on Compressor, I AC-3'd the audio separately from the video.

All the artifacts are gone!

And I didn't have to go back to older versions. Of course it's stupid that I should have to do this, as 2-pass VBR is touted as the "highest quality" by Apple, so somebody dropped pizza on the code when they went to update Compressor 1.

Funny that DVDSP's default encoding settings are 1-pass!

Simon, I had the same problems. Export as quicktime self-contained, include DVDSP markers and DON'T check the recompress all frames box! Including the DVDSP markers makes sure the compression markers are exported as well. It makes sense to insert and name DVD chapter markers as well in FCP, as they will be included in the mv2 file you eventually import into DVDSP.

Then import the quicktime into compressor, and create a new preset that is 1-pass, NO VBR, 7.2 bitrate, motion estimator BEST. If you drag your movie into the preview window you can see all the compression markers that FCP automatically included, as well as the chapter markers (different color).

Submit the job. You can compress the audio to AC-3 the same time as you compress the video by adding the Dolby 2 function to your new 1-pass preset. All your audio must be 48K 16bit in FCP before you export, or it will go into the center channel on 5.1 sound systems.

Import the finished m2v and audio files into DVDSP. Notice how your chapter markers you inserted in FCP magically appear! Do your menus and buttons etc., then build the job. I don't use build/format as I have had better luck just dragging the master build folder that contains the VIDEO_TS folders into TOAST 6 and burning it at 1X DVD setting just to be safe.

All my previously artifacted movies, which are heavily effected with lots of transitions. NOW HAD NO ARTIFACTS WHATSOEVER! My thought of suicide or at least a Ben & Jerry's binge had passed!

All I did was a little tweaking, basically encoding using compressor's "lower quality" 1-pass setting, not the usual DVD 90-min. best setting, which the manual says to use for the best possible quality.

You can bypass Compressor stand-alone completely, because DVDSP uses Compressor to encode imported quicktimes as well, and you can change the settings to 1-pass 7.2 bitrate there as well. Compressor just has more advanced settings available.

FCP also uses Compressor when you "export using quicktime conversion." So it's hard to get away from using it unless you have a third party mpeg2 encoder. I'm thinking about BitVice, which markets its product as "Probably the best software MPEG2 encoder in the world"