A friend and I were watching a standard def DVD (The Lucky Seven), and as we were watching my jaw dropped. "Did you see that?", I said, and we hit review on the remote and watched the scene again. I could not believe my eyes, the image had been crushed completely. It looked to me like an encoding problem and so I fired up MPressionist and took a look at the disc.

Sure enough, without even needing to scan the feature to find the timecode of the problematic scene, the compression overview graph showed an out-of-place compression peak about 25% of the way through. I moved the playback to that spot, let it run and the problem became more obvious. The encoder used in this sequence had run into a problem with a time-lapse section. The result was that an entire GOP ran at maximum compression, resulting in the blockiness shown in these images.

It is possible that the encoder they employed could not be adjusted to correct this problem. However, using MPressionist to review the charts for the disc could have saved replicating and distributing this disc, and potential embarrassment with the client.