GH1 - 24p in 60i Stream. Can someone explain STREAM/WRAPPER?

[Jeff Harper]

Oh well, what can you do....

[Jeff Harper]

Corey, your post from a few days ago just showed up in my email box, some kind of strange delay. Anyway, I'm glad you have found 720p acceptable for your work.

We would certainly all prefer 1080p, but the option is just not there with my gear right now.

Now in defense of 24p, the guys that know how to use it can make it sing. Think Pacific Pictures, etc. The best known Cincinnati videographer uses it and his stuff looks perfect, no issues, and actually a lot of guys are using it across the country. The problem is the vast majority of us don't take the time to learn how to shoot for it, or they are using it for the wrong applications, and then it looks bad and they think 24p must be crap.

I'm just tickled to be shooting in HD in a format that is relatively easy to work with and looks great.

[William Hohauser]

1080 50i can be thought as 540 50f (yes, I know it effectively isn't but that is the resolution of a single field) so actually 720p has a higher single frame resolution as it's a progressive format. 720p up-rezes to 1080i very well. Many high end cameras can now record 1080p (and above). Interlacing will become a thing of the past. It has it's roots in 1940's broadcast television.

[Dave Mercer]

Thanks William. I need to do a test upresing 720p50 to see how I like it. What patch do you use to film 720p?

[Alex Dolgin]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

I'm using 720 60p, which doesn't have the resolution of 1080, of course, but like you I have different cams with different abilities, so I'm kind of stuck with 720p. Not that I'm complaining, I love 720p, it is SO easy to work with, and it converts to SD widescreen perfectly from Vegas' timeline, where 1080 I need to resize and it just gets more complicated. So 720 60p is truly perfect for me anyway, really. And of course for the web 720 is optimal, as Vimeo only does 720 anyway for HD, so I am fortunate is a way to be forced into 720p.

Jeff, can you share how do you bring it to DVDA? Do you render your 60p timeline to MainConcept MPEG-2? What setting?

[Jeff Harper]

Alex, it depends, are you talking about internet, or bluray or DVD?

I've got it down for Bluray and internet now, but for DVD I don't have the answers as I thought I did, as you can see from another thread I brought up. My current DVD project I've encoded to interlaced and haven't seen how it plays out yet, as I'm still edtiting.

[Alex Dolgin]

It is for a DVD. So far I tried a standard NTSC template (29.970i), with bad artifacts. Tried 24P- looks clean, but too much motion jerkiness here and there...

[Jeff Harper]

I made my last one by turning the mpeg 2 DVDA Widescreen template for rendering into progressive, and it worked beautifully, but I have been told this is not the right way to go about it. I am giving the whole subject a rest until I'm done edtiting. Check out my other thread for SD DVD in this forum.

I think changing to 24p out of Vegas is definitely NOT the way to go with 720p footage, however.

[Corey Graham]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Now in defense of 24p, the guys that know how to use it can make it sing. Think Pacific Pictures, etc. The best known Cincinnati videographer uses it and his stuff looks perfect, no issues, and actually a lot of guys are using it across the country. The problem is the vast majority of us don't take the time to learn how to shoot for it, or they are using it for the wrong applications, and then it looks bad and they think 24p must be crap.

For sure. I've shot in 24p for things and they've turned out great. It's just definitely not for the weddings I shoot. And once I get my mitts on some good 1080/60p equipment, I'll never even think of 24p again for any application (unless it's some sort of delivery requirement).

[Jeff Harper]

Alex, essentially, this is what I've been told to do by David Newman of Cineform, if I understand him correctly.

Using Cineform, I re-encode the footage to 16:9 SD progressive, then edit on a 30p timeline in Vegas, and render when done using DVDA mpeg 2 Widescreen template, but change it from interlaced to progressive. He says progressive DVDs play fine, and that he's made hundreds of them.

[Jeff Harper]

Alex, this is the latest, changed to fit you if you are not converting footage.

1. Start a new project using 16:9 DVD type settings but change interlaced setting to progressive. In other words, field order should be "none", not upper or lower field first.

2. Bring footage into edting program, and if you want to, then crop the footage to fill the screen. When you first bring it in it will have very small black bars on the sides, cropping will fix that. This is optional and up to you. If you use Vegas and need to learn how to crop your footage, let me us know, there is a simple script that will do it with basically on click.

3. Edit footage

4. Render out to 16:9 for DVD, using correct template in your editing program. Make sure to render to 30p, to match your project settings.

Done.

[Alex Dolgin]

Jeff, I have been doing this last few hours, and was about to post a question to your previous post, why to use Cineform? Seems to be an extra step. Direct encoding to MPEG-2 30p does the trick as the interlacing artifacts are all gone, and video looks pretty smooth, better than the same at 24P. But just about when I was getting ready to post, I run into a puzzling problem. The MPEG-2 file that was rendered from the timeline came in at just over 3GB, with plenty of room under 4.7GB DVD limit. The same file when brought into DVDA 5.2 shows as 5.7GB (!) way over the red line. Tried the same with my older DVDA V3 and got the same results. There was something in 30P file that confused DVDA and caused this problem. I decided to prepare the DVD anyway thinking it was just a bug in reporting the file size. Unfortunately DVDA spent about 40min doing something (may be duplicating the frames) and ended up with about 5.7GB DVD folder.
Then I re rendered the same timeline to much higher compression setting, got a small ~2GB MPEG-2 file which DVDA had no problem using and reporting correct size. So my last test which I just finished, was splitting the MPEG-2 file into 2, bringing them to DVDA as to separate files and preparing the DVD again. This time the visual quality was good as the bit rate was kept around 4.2 in average, and the total size fit the DVD at about 4.4GB.
I wish somebody could explain what exactly is happening when using 30p for DVD. I suspect that DVDA treats each frame as a field and duplicates the same frame 2 times.

[Jeff Harper]

Alex, I've been going for almost 24 hours, so I need to keep this short, just got back from a wedding, long day.

However, regarding Cineform, I need an intermediate codec because I am edting 4 cameras at a time, so the raw footage is too difficutl for me to get smooth playback when editing. And since the current projects I'm working on are going to DVD and not bluray, Cineform is just what the doctor ordered.

Regarding your issues with your DVD,be sure to use the DVDA template as shown for rendering, with the only change to it being progressive. If your project is over 90 minutes or so it will not fit on DVD unless you render after adjusting the bit rate in Vegas.

You did not say how long your project was. And if DVDA is recompressing, you definitely (I think) did something wrong in your render, at least that is my thought. If your file is not DVDA compliant, then DVDA will recompress it, which is not good. That' why you must use the correct DVDA template in Vegas for rendering, to keep it compliant and to avoid recompression.

I have not used this workflow all the way through as you have, so I suppose I could run into the same problem but I hope not.

[Alex Dolgin]

Jeff, I am not doing it that often, my current licensed Vegas installation is V6/DVDA V3 :-) (I am using trial downloads for this project) so I might be way behind the times, but I never heard of a 1.5 hours rule. This project in fact is 1 hour 31 minutes long. I believe the only thing I changed in the template was the frame rate to P as you said. When DVDA showed almost 6GB size and started processing it, it did not just render I assume, as it would be several hours to render this file. It took about 40 minutes, seems to be it was changing something in the file without doing heavy duty work of recompressing.
After all that fiasco, I sliced the same MPEG-2 file in two halfs, and the size problem went away, the program fit into the 4.7gb limit and looks fantastic - clean and no judder.

[Jeff Harper]

Alex, the 90 minute thing isn't a rule so much, that is just "about" what will fit for a DVD, depending also on the size of the audio file. You can fit much more on a DVD, but the bit rate must be lowered accordingly.

I highly doubt progressive files are larger, but I don't know. My last project was progressive, 90 minutes and fit perfectly from Vegas, without any recompression etc by DVDA, so I'm not sure why your files are so large. Something happening, can't imagine what, wish I had an idea for you.