Addition Of Intermitent Noise

[Matt Alcorn]

Dear Toast Friends,

 

I am a new user to to Toast, but have considerable experience with DVD studio.

 

I transferred some 8mm movies to HD and burned them to bluray (I'll get to my workflow in a sec)

 

8mm resolves as 4:3, and in the black area outside the 4:3 I get intermitent noise that gets bad enough to form horizontal lines. It becomes very distracting although it's not ruining the 4:3 movie area.

 

However, like I said it is intermitent. Sometimes it's completely fine; sometime a little noise like grain, and then boom big noise in horizontal lines. (makes me think there's an 'auto' setting I don't know about)

 

Here's what I did:

 

I projected 8mm onto foam core and shot the foam core with an HPX-3700; creating a 10-bit analog to digital conversion. (awesome so far)

 

Took to final cut. Added two layers of a very tiny amount of sharpening (great refocusing trick); and then added a 3-way color correction filter.

 

Note, the dark area outside the 4:3 image is the underexposed foam core.

 

I then output a full prores 422 master; then use Compressor to create a m2v file for Toast.

 

I turned re-ecode off in toast.

 

The RUB: When I look at the M2V file in VLC, I can see a tiny, but acceptable, amount of noise in the outside black area; but it is greatly increased between that and the final bluray burn.

 

Again, it is intermitent. Sometimes it's fine, sometime light, sometime so dense to create horizintal lines.

 

The noise is mostly noticable in the black area, though you can see it in the actual 4:3 frame area...

 

Any idea what is causing this? Why is it intermitent?

 

Thanks a billion,

Matthew Alcorn

www.imageriverfilms.com

[Matt Alcorn]

I continue to investigate. When I play the disc back on my burner using some free mac software; the noise is there, but does not resolve nearly as intensly as it does on my Panasonic home bluray player. No horizontal stripes either.

[tsantee]

Puzzling. I don't know how Toast can be introducing the noise because it is merely multiplexing the Compressor video. Maybe there is a way for you to change how you masking to the black sides in FCP. It could be the sharpening and color filtering of the black zones created artifacts. Are you using Verbatim media? If you choose Save as Disc Image with Toast and mount the disc image you can play the video with Roxio Video Player (Toast Extras menu) or VLC. What does it look like after being authored by Toast and not yet burned to disc?

[Matt Alcorn]

Dear DG, I cropped a new movie master so the black area outside the 4:3 movie area is truly black and has no filters on it.

 

Then I rendered a new master. Then I took that file into compressor and rendered both as an M2V and H.264; then to Toast (making sure 'no encode' was selected and 'progressive' for the field button.)

 

The new black area outside the 4:3 movie is clean; but the movie itself is still dirty. I'm beginng to think that the sharpening filters are causing this. I have a non-filtered movie that I will do a new test with...

 

I appreciate your thoughts and consideration.

 

Matt