Final cut pro exporting?

[Adamakin]

Right so I am at uni and we have shot a film on a Sony PD170 (SD). Obviously I want to get the best possible quality from it and I would have thought exporting it in DV PAL would be the right answer but it seems really grainy, whereas H.264 looks better. However H.264 kind of interlaces when people in the frame move.

Anyone else had this problem? Any suggestions?

 

[Irish_Tom]

Are you putting this on DVD or web authoring it?

I'm not familiar with Final Cut - I use Premiere but I would have thought the export setting were pretty similar. I'm surprised DV PAL isn't up to scratch for DVD authoring.

Panzer

 

[Russinating]

DV PAL is the highest quality you can achieve - it's basically exactly the same standard as what the PD170 records in and that's the standard you'd want to view it on your own computer or to render it back onto a MiniDV tape.

If you're wanting to put it onto a DVD you'll need MPEG2 or MOV (unsure about the MOV as I don't use a Mac, but I'm fairly sure iWhatever supports that).

You're probably seeing less grain in the X264 render because you're losing quality so and it's kind of 'smoothing' out the image. As for interlacing, just make sure that Order of Fields (or similar, again, don't use FCP) is set to None and not Upper\Lower Field First.

Hope that helps

 

[Adamakin]

Yeah i thought that about DV PAL. It just seems to be a much lower quality, i don't really know why. But as you say if i put it to a DVD it needs to converted into MPEG-2 anyways.

Thanks for the help!