Mark,
I take my m2ts clips, archive them ‘as-shot’, then make a conversion to the PAL equivalent of your format (720 x 576) in mpg2 of good quality. I am not familiar with the procedure to be followed in Apple’s ‘Final Cut’, because I do not use it. A great deal depends upon the quality of ‘codecs’, (I use ‘Main Concept’) and what settings you employ. For example I have reduced my GOP’s to twelve, from the default fifteen. Taken overall, that sometimes gives your clips an ‘edge’, because of the increased density of the all-important ‘I-frames’. Within mpg2, itself, I tweak everything up close to the upper-limits permitted by the DVD-Standard. That makes for somewhat larger files and longer processing-times, but pays dividends in the quality of the finished product. My philosophy is that having my footage, for editing, available as good-quality mpg2 saves a lot of hassles and permits a very direct route to disc. But, some purists might not agree with that, with (say) my bit-rate of 9200, for example, as standard. There is another school of thought which regards hoisting the rate above 7000, as a waste-of-time, just the same as there are those who say that you cannot ‘improve’ on ‘ffmpeg’ as a codec. What I do know, is that I am quite happy with the comparatively minor amount of the original m2ts image-quality which has to be sacrificed on the way to DVD. None of this addresses your problem, directly, but some of it may be helpful.
Ian Smith
Dunedin, New Zealand.
