I've been messing around with Compressor 2 and DVDSP4 for the
least week or so, and I've found some striking limitations in what
you can do with creating HD content.
DVDSP4 can only encode MPEG-2 as a HD format. It doesn't
support 24p natively, but can take. It has a minimum data rate of 10
Mbps, which is about as low as you could imagine going for HD.
Compressor 2 is required to make DVDSP4 compatible H.264 .mov
files. They only work if encoded with the specific HD H.264
presets. However, these lack 1080 as a frame size option - 720 is as
big as it goes. However, it supports setting data rates well lower
than 10 Mbps.
So, in my quest to put a two hour 1080p24 movie on a DVD-9 HD
DVD via the suite, I've been rather stymied. The best I came up with
was using Cinema tools to convert to 1080p25, and then encode at
720p50 (so every other frame will be an exact duplicate of the
previous). That should give me a reasonably good progressive
experience.
Still, these seem like some pretty bizarre limitations. The
mainstream HD format on disc is clearly going to be 1080p24, and it's
rather frustrating to not have native support for EITHER mode. And I
could have sworn that Apple was demonstrating 1080p24 at NAB.
Fingers crossed for a good .1 update in a few months. Really,
it's impressive that Apple got HD authoring out in any form this
early, so a few speedbumps are to be expected.
