Problem with MKV to DV - Inconsistent Quality?

[aboutblue]

Hi. I want to edit a couple anime clips for a project I'm working on so I'm trying to bring an H.264 mkv into Final Cut Pro. To start with, I opened it in Quicktime Pro and chose export to DV. Now here's the weird thing. I opened the resulting DV in a couple different players to test the result. In VLC it looks just fine (except there's this horrible jackhammer sound) and in Quicktime the audio is fine but it looks really bad because the lines appear jagged. When I brought the DV into Final Cut it also looked really bad. Just to see what would happen I then exported it from Final Cut as a Quicktime movie, as if I were exporting my finished project. When I opened that in Quicktime it had nasty jagged lines but when I opened it in MPlayer it looked perfect.

So I decided to try converting the mkv to DV with MPEG Streamclip instead. This worked just fine and when I tested the resulting DV it looked great in everything: Quicktime, VLC and MPlayer... but when I brought it into Final Cut it looked terrible! Once again, when I exported it from Final Cut it looked bad in Quicktime but fine in MPlayer.

I'm incredibly confused about all this. Maybe I'm doing something completely wrong, but shouldn't the quality be consistent no matter what player or program you're viewing it with? I can't tell if it looks bad or not anymore.

I'm new at this so advice would be great. Thanks!

[tomlee59]

There are several possible causes of what you are seeing. If the video itself is of low resolution, then "jaggies" will naturally appear in straightforward playback. However, many players have built-in upscalers of varying quality, and these can reduce the visibility of such artifacts. In this scenario, the file itself is poor, but playback quality can be artificially improved by the upscaler.

In other cases, if the video is very high resolution, but your computer is slow, many players will resort to a number of coping strategies in an effort to keep up, including discarding frames, and possibly downscaling the image, causing the introduction of jaggies. In this case, the file is perfectly fine, but playback quality is artificially degraded.

To zero in on which of these (if any) is the actual cause, can you provide a bit more info on the details of the source and target files, such as bitrate, resolution, etc? And is your computer profile information up to date? The more info, the better.

[aboutblue]

I'm not entirely sure what info would be helpful but I'll just list everything I can think of. The mkvs are H.264, 640 x 480, stream bitrate 762 kb/s with avc1 video codec.

I don't really see much relevant info about the DV file except that the resolution is 720 x 480. Why is it a different resolution? Could this be the problem? Although the Quicktime media info says it's 720 x 480 but also has 640 x 480 in parenthesis and listed as the normal size so I don't really know.

I don't think the file is poor but then my computer isn't slow either so I don't know what to think. I do have DVDs I could work with instead but the interlacing is really bad and that seemed like a much bigger headache.