Maximizing HD to SD Quality

[John Peterson]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

I don't generally have to create DVDs from stuff I shoot. Occasionally, but not often. The last DVD project I shot, I did create 60i DVDs from 1080p/30 though. Generally, my delivery is for the web, and I shoot 24p. I shot 720/60p for a project last month but that was not DVD delivery.

Did you by any chance test it on a CRT TV? I am going crazy trying to get SD DVD free from aliasing and twitter from 1080/30p EX1 footage.

If yes, how did you do it?

Thanks,

John

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by John Peterson

Did you by any chance test it on a CRT TV? I am going crazy trying to get SD DVD free from aliasing and twitter from 1080/30p EX1 footage.

If yes, how did you do it?

Thanks,

John

My editing machine previews out to a JVC Professional 14" calibrated monitor. I don't do anything special, and don't have twitter or aliasing issues.

[John Peterson]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

My editing machine previews out to a JVC Professional 14" calibrated monitor. I don't do anything special, and don't have twitter or aliasing issues.

I use the JVC 15 inch professional CRT calibrated monitor, but I see the problems. When you say you don't do anything special, how are you interlacing the footage? Are you resizing using the method you described using Virtual Dub resize first and then interlacing using AE? Have you viewed it on a standard CRT television played from a regular DVD player?

John

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by John Peterson

I use the JVC 15 inch professional CRT calibrated monitor, but I see the problems. When you say you don't do anything special, how are you interlacing the footage? Are you resizing using the method you described using Virtual Dub resize first and then interlacing using AE? Have you viewed it on a standard CRT television played from a regular DVD player?

John

When I bring the material into DVD Architect, I get asked what kind of DVD I want to create. I choose NTSC 60i. I don't do anything beyond this. But maybe your source material is different than mine.

I generally write 30 minutes to a DVD RW to take home and check colors, sound, etc on a normal SDTV. I then check the DVD on our 72" plasmas at the office. If I like it, I burn the full project.

[Harry Simpson]

So my 5D Mk2 shoots 1080/30fps so should i produce an AVI in Vegas at that? (ie no resizing) I had been rendering in Vegas to 720.

I did find Lanczos scaler.
Where is the HuffYUV or Lagarith lossless in Vegas and in VirtualDub. I've spent hours looking for those suckas!!

Thanks

[John Peterson]

Originally Posted by Harry Simpson

So my 5D Mk2 shoots 1080/30fps so should i produce an AVI in Vegas at that? (ie no resizing) I had been rendering in Vegas to 720.

I did find Lanczos scaler.
Where is the HuffYUV or Lagarith lossless in Vegas and in VirtualDub. I've spent hours looking for those suckas!!

Thanks

In Vegas choose Render As and pick a template. Then click on Custom/Video/Video Format. They are in the drop down list.

In Virtual Dub they are under the Video/Compression/Select Video Compression list

John

[Richard Hunter]

Originally Posted by Harry Simpson

So my 5D Mk2 shoots 1080/30fps so should i produce an AVI in Vegas at that? (ie no resizing) I had been rendering in Vegas to 720.

I did find Lanczos scaler.
Where is the HuffYUV or Lagarith lossless in Vegas and in VirtualDub. I've spent hours looking for those suckas!!

Thanks

Hi Harry. Somewhere you have to resize the video down to DVD resolution (720x480). You can do it in Vegas or DVDA, or you can use VD to get better quality, which is what this thread started off talking about. There is no point rendering to an intermediate size like 720, so if you need 2 sizes of output, it is better to render 2 times.

The Huffyuv and Lagarith codec will not be on your system unless you downloaded and installed them. Definitely worth doing that, especially since they are free.

Richard

[Harry Simpson]

Thanks

They are in ther drop down for configure only for certain video formats - they are not in the video format dropdown. Maybe before i die i'll be able to get enough info to do this. Appreciate all the help....I'll keep trying.

[Harry Simpson]

Thanks Richard,

That helps....i'll google those items and install them ( i actually see them out from the configure) under the Encoder tab of the FFdShow video codec

Thanks
Harry

[Harry Simpson]

So i've come a long way in the last couple of days and i appreciate the patience shown here with me.

At this point i've refined my process to this:

1. Pull .MOV (native 1920x1080p/30fps) into timeline
2. Edit video, add titles, cross fades, credits, whatever - finish content of movie.
3. Render in Vegas Studio to 1920x1080p/30fps with Lagarith pixel ar 1:1 (if i play resultant AVI in Windows Media Player it'd like learning how to drive a stick shift - figured that was my poor computer cound'nt process the full HD but the MP2 will be smooth)
4. Pull the full sized AVI into VirtualDub
5. In VirtualDub set the filter - add resize with Lanczos scaler to 720x405 (Match original AR)
6. In VirtualDub choose compression type for output to a Lagarith or HuffYUV AVI (Think i may have skipped this step in VD though i did this already in Vegas when i rendered....do i need to do it twice?)
7. Save .avi file
7. Bring that into DVDA and select single movie and it will automatically convert it to a MP2 for DVD burn.

I'm still crankin the VD ouput at this time........I'll take it all the way through DVDA and report back my progress.

Again thank you for all the great advice here!!

[Perrone Ford]

Harry, you're just about there brother!

Originally Posted by Harry Simpson

6. In VirtualDub choose compression type for output to a Lagarith or HuffYUV AVI (Think i may have skipped this step in VD though i did this already in Vegas when i rendered....do i need to do it twice?)

You're not doing it twice. Every editing program needs to know how you want the output from *IT'S* work done. If you don't tell VDub different, it will write your output to uncompressed AVI. Which will create a file about 3-4 times larger than the original. The convert you did in Vegas has zero bearing here once you resize the footage. So yes, you need to tell VDub what you want to encode the footage as.

Originally Posted by Harry Simpson

I'm still crankin the VD ouput at this time........I'll take it all the way through DVDA and report back my progress.

You're going to love it compared to what you had before. Now I will say this. I prefer to do my mpeg2 compression outside of DVDA. Either with Vegas, or with another good Mpeg2 tool. DVDA will do a nice job, and you'll see the difference. But if you want to step up later to a better mpeg2 tool you'll get another gain. Think of using a separate Mpeg2 encoder in this workflow, like using VirtualDub to rescale. There are just better tools out there to get the job done.

[Harry Simpson]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

Harry, you're just about there brother!



You're not doing it twice. Every editing program needs to know how you want the output from *IT'S* work done. If you don't tell VDub different, it will write your output to uncompressed AVI. Which will create a file about 3-4 times larger than the original. The convert you did in Vegas has zero bearing here once you resize the footage. So yes, you need to tell VDub what you want to encode the footage as.

Turns out i did have it set to Lagarith compression. The resize with the Lancose3

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

You're going to love it compared to what you had before. Now I will say this. I prefer to do my mpeg2 compression outside of DVDA. Either with Vegas, or with another good Mpeg2 tool. DVDA will do a nice job, and you'll see the difference. But if you want to step up later to a better mpeg2 tool you'll get another gain. Think of using a separate Mpeg2 encoder in this workflow, like using VirtualDub to rescale. There are just better tools out there to get the job done.

So DVDA will do a nice job but actually taking the VD resized AVI back into Vegas and rerender to MP2 (which Vegas type do you use?)

[Perrone Ford]

Not quite sure what you were trying to say here, but it is my *belief* that taking the video back into Vegas for the mpeg2 render will yield higher quality results.

[Jim Snow]

Perrone, Thank you for all of the helpful information that you have been sharing with us. When I posed the question when I started the thread, I had no idea how much useful information would come out in the discussion.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Jim Snow

Perrone, Thank you for all of the helpful information that you have been sharing with us. When I posed the question when I started the thread, I had no idea how much useful information would come out in the discussion.

I beat my head against this stuff for weeks trying to find a better way to help out a friend. I must have tried a dozen codecs. To make matters tougher, he was on a Mac and I was on a PC.

I worked with the same guy on a different project and had to figure out HD PC <-> Mac workflow. That one took a while too!

I've gotten so much good info from this place, I am just glad to be able to give a little back from what I've learned on long, frustrating nights.