Re: Best Codec for HD Delivery?

In my experience, you can get a much better looking picture with H.264 if you
export and encode directly within FCP, don't use compressor. For a 3min piece,
you aren't talking about a large amount of time to encode. Compressor is best
when you need to save time, not when you need to make a great picture.

Select sequence, export using quicktime conversion.
Select quicktime movie, options, h264, high quality will be a
large file and you will not see much difference from the original.
Best quality is great too at less file size. Try them to see what you like.
key frames automatic, data rate automatic,
size, 640x360 is a nice size for computer monitors,
but if you want to use 720p size, use 1280x720.
Audio AAC, 48k and 128kbps will be nice.

Presets and Compressor are nice and all, but not the best quality.
You gotta play around on your own. Do multiple encodes to see
what you like. That's the only way. Compressor is the bees knees
if you have an 8 core Mac Pro and it takes you 5 minutes where it
used to take you 30 to encode. But for small jobs like you mention,
export directly from FCP. You will definitely see the difference in
quality of artifacts.

You also need to worry about what data-rate the computer that's
playing back this data DVD will be able to process. Some can't follow
high data rate DVDs. You need to experiment, in my opinion.

Dan