Canopus Procoder and 24p DVD??

[Peter Moore]

Sorry for double posting this but I think it's more appropriate for this forum than Vegas.

Does anyone know whether it's possible to generate DVD-compliant 24p M2V files (for Encore, Maestro, etc.) using Canopus Procoder? If so how?

Thanks!

[Steve Leone]

I honestly dont have experience with Maestro, however, Sonic products Like elementary streams rather than MPG-2 files....have you tried outputting elementary streams and using those in Maestro?? Just an idea...oh, BTW...heres a turorial I found....seems this guy is using elementary streams too....
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/mpg/maestro.htm

[Rob Lohman]

Peter's post went into a stray thread instead of your thread, Steve,
so I've merged it here.

[Peter Moore]

Steve,
It's not a matter of using elementary streams. It's a matter of the MPEG2 decoder setting the repeat fields flag properly for 3:2 pulldown. Now, I can give Canopus 24p input with no problem, and there is a flag for pulldown, but will it duplicate fields, or will it set the repeat flags properly so as to not waste the extra space, and so that the DVD player will recognize a progressive scan disc?

[Rob Lohman]

Is this something you could easily test Peter? Perhaps with a
demo verions of ProCoder (Express)?

[Peter Moore]

I actually have and I can't for the life of me tell whether the mpeg file is progressive or not. It's going to be the same size regardless since you set the bitrate to be per second, not per frame. The file itself reads 29.97i regardless. So there's really no way to tell as far as I can tell (which of course begs the question if it's not perceivable why bother?) But of course I just want to know that my 24p footage from the DVX100A is being put to good use and the bits are being used as efficiently as possible. I can't compare canopus' output to MainConcept - there's no comparison because of the quality of encoder.

The only real way I guess would be to somehow analyze the MPEG file to see if the repeat_first_Field flag is set, but I'll be damned if I know how to do that.

[Rob Lohman]

There are programs out there that can display mpeg information.
The best I can think of is to get a demo of TMPGEnc
and see what it can tell you.

[Peter Moore]

Thanks, I just downloaded it but I can't really find anywhere where it tells you the informaiton about the source MPEG file. Any ideas?

[Peter Moore]

Since you guys all tried to help, I'll post what I've learned about the issue for future reference if you're interested:

Apparently if procoder is given true 23.976p material, and you set the 3:2 pulldown flag in the filters section, it will create MPEG-2 with the repeat_first_field flags set appropriately, i.e. it will be DVD-compliant progressive.

The problem is getting Vegas to output a 24p format. The 24p DVs that Vegas outputs are not true 23.976p material. They 2:3 24p DV actually creates plain vanilla telecined footage which, as of now, Procoder can't inverse telecine. The 2:3:3:2 24p DV Procoder doesn't know what to do with at all. So both those are out.

The only other options are to use a different codec, or go uncompressed. I might do the latter. 2 hours of uncompressed footage is about 170 GB. I have just enough HD space to handle that. Seems like a big waste though. Someone else suggested I used AVISynth to modify my 29.97i DV AVI files to do the pulldown removal and then feed that into procoder. That's a possibility to.

The annoying thing is there seems to be no good almost non-destructive general purpose codec for handling 23.976p footage. It's very odd that we can't just use the DV codec to make 23.976p progressive files. But rules are rules, I guess.

[Rob Lohman]

The problem with that codec is that the framerate you mention
simply isn't in the specs. Therefor to be compliant it must be
25 fps or 30 (29.97) fps. Nothing else. You can't really blame the
programs to stick to the standards (which is a good thing).

Maybe you could try frameserving it from Vegas to ProCoder?
This should work perfectly if you have your Vegas project set
to 23.976 fps.

You can get a Vegas frameserver from this page. Do read the
instructions as well.

Frameserving works on sending the data from one application
directly to the other without going to your harddisk (except for
a relative small frameserving buffer file). It is uncompressed.

[Peter Moore]

"Nothing else. You can't really blame the
programs to stick to the standards (which is a good thing)."

No, I mean I wouldn't expect the "compliant DV codec" to allow 23.976p, I just wish there was a codec using the same technology as DV that allowed arbitrary frame rates. Something like that would be very useful both for SD and even HD non-linear editing - a high compression, intra-frame only codec.

Anyway yes they were suggesting on the Canopus page to frameserve from Vegas to Canopus directly. Couldn't for the life of me figure out how though. :) I'll check out that page and see if I can figure it out. Thanks for the help.

[Peter Moore]

And the verdict is -

YES! It works like a charm. So that's how to get 24p DVD out of Canopus and Vegas. Use that plugin pack frameserver, and then set the 3:2 pulldown flag in Canopus to "23.976" and keep all the other settings normal (top field first, 29.97 framerate, etc.) and that's it.

[Rob Lohman]

Glad I could be of assistance and you got it to work! Thanks for
the time to try it all out Peter!

[Peter Moore]

Argh this is so frustrating! Everything was working, until Vegas decides to crash 25% of the way through the process. Back to square one. :(

Well, no, actually - back to outputting unocompressed AVIs to feed procoder. There's got to be a better codec out there that is DV-quality but supports arbitrary frame rates.