DVD Rendering From HD Still a Crap Shoot?

[Chris Harding]

Hi Phil

Thanks...I have just one issue...when I save the timeline to AVI using the Sony YUV Codec it saves the file perfectly but when I bring it back into Vegas it looks like a 4:3 clip???? When I saved the PAR was definately 1.4568 yet the image seems to be almost square????

We are rendering to a 720x576 file here are we not??? or should we be rendering out to the same size AVI as the source???? It defaults to 720x576 but seems to ignore the PAR for some reason ...quality is great on the AVI but as I said it has 4:3 dimensions in preview with black pillars each side.

BTW : I'm actually shooting 1920x1080i and have been stripping the interlacing in Upshift..I can also leave the converted footage as interlaced if you think it's better to do so???

I must be doing something wrong here?????

Thanks for any help

Chris

[Edward Troxel]

Chris, when you bring that clip back into Vegas, what if you manually change the PAR back to 1.4568?

[Phil Lee]

Hi

Originally Posted by Chris Harding

Hi Phil

Thanks...I have just one issue...when I save the timeline to AVI using the Sony YUV Codec it saves the file perfectly but when I bring it back into Vegas it looks like a 4:3 clip???? When I saved the PAR was definately 1.4568 yet the image seems to be almost square????

We are rendering to a 720x576 file here are we not??? or should we be rendering out to the same size AVI as the source???? It defaults to 720x576 but seems to ignore the PAR for some reason ...quality is great on the AVI but as I said it has 4:3 dimensions in preview with black pillars each side.

BTW : I'm actually shooting 1920x1080i and have been stripping the interlacing in Upshift..I can also leave the converted footage as interlaced if you think it's better to do so???

I must be doing something wrong here?????

Thanks for any help

Chris

Sorry yes missed out some details. I'd set the project settings to DV Widescreen PAL but keep top field first, and then when you right click on the clip set it as suggested by Edward Troxel, this will give you the correct preview as well.

The AVI will probably look good in the 4:3 aspect ratio as this is keeping with the square pixels, it's when you stretch out those square pixels to get a 16:9 aspect ratio that the interlacing doesn't quite match up giving rise to some jagged edges etc.

As for the starting out point, you need to turn interlaced to progressive in order to resize, so if you hadn't done it, Sony Vegas would have, so I'd continue with what you are doing. It is possible to take the top field as a picture of 1920x540 and resize that to 720x288, then take the bottom field and do the same, then weave them back into an interlaced 720x576 field using AVISynth in order to avoid the progressive step which can in itself add artefacts, but believe me, this looks a whole lot worse.

Regards

Phil

[Chris Harding]

Hi Phil

Thanks!! That works fine if you right click the clip and change the PAR from 1.096 to 1.4568.

Thanks to Edward too!!!

The only thing seems like Vegas 9 doesn't have the prioritize quality over speed??? Video is set to max and rendering to best.

I run off a couple of clips and dump them on a DVD tomorrow (so I can compare a render direct from the timeline and one using your method on a TV) In Aussie here it's sorta coming close to bedtime!!!!

Many thanks for your expert guidance!!! I'll post my comments in the morning once I have viewed the results....it would be great if there is a marked difference!!!

Chris

[Brian Luce]

I've had good luck with TMPG also. Great value for $99. I used to go the Virtual Dub route but felt it was too many hoops to jump through and I didn't like the user interface of VD.

[Christopher Young]

Chris H. Yes I just use the rendered out MXF files from the time line in Reference. BTW. You can buy the MainConcept codecs individually... not all $4.5K's worth! I just love it for it's simplicity and speed. Doing weekly TV shows doesn't leave me much time for experimentation so a quick turn around for the DVD releases is big for me.

Phil L. Very interested in your approach and method. A rainy holiday day here in Sydney and nothing on so will give your Vegas treatments a go.

[Chris Harding]

Hi Chris and Phil

Thanks for the responses ..OK I have done a test using 1920x1080i footage from a wedding last weekend that went thru Upshift to make it Progressive and 50mbps MPEG2 m2t files that look pretty good on the monitor.

I made two test MPEG2 clips ..the first was a direct render to MPEG2 using the DVD PAL Widescreen template...the second I first rendered to an AVI using the Sony YUV codec ...dropped it into a new project (and had to correct the aspect too) I did all the suggestions too Phil and then rendered that out to MPEG2

I put both clips on a DVD running sequentially and watch them at both normal seating distance from the TV (32" LCD) and I also sat real close as well on a second run.

Gosh!! It's really hard to tell if one is better than the other...and normal distance I really couldn't tell at all and close up the 2nd clip (with the intermediate AVI) might have been a fraction sharper especially on closeups of the groom and groomsmen.
I honestly have to say that I don't think that the average viewer could spot and difference at all, especially considering that they wouldn't be looking for sharpness etc etc but appreciating the video and listening to the audio.

I have to look at the fact that I will need to render each edit twice and I probably have around 16 clips total in a wedding so that is extra time involved. It's hard to watch a soft image directly after you have been at the computer watching the same footage at 1920x1080 resolution so again it already looks fuzzy on the TV..... Chris Y ????? Would you say that your methods would allow the average viewer to say "Wow!!! that is so clear and crisp" ????

I'll wait for results once Chris Y has tried a few clip using Phil's method....maybe I was looking just for sharpness and expecting razor sharp edges from an upscaled PAL SD clip????

All this effort, of course is still greatly appreciated guys!!!!!

Chris

[Leslie Wand]

i just have to throw in my luddite's 2cnts worth....

i've followed this thread, and many more of similar ilk on a number of forums, and even tried quite a number of workflow suggestions that promised a 'real' hd experience in sd...

quite frankly i find it all a bit of a black cat in a dark room - sd isn't hd, and never will be.
going from hdv (pal) to sd dvd via vegas's normal route (and even from avchd source material), gives me results that are almost indistinguishable from some of the most convoluted workflows listed and experimented with.

at the end of the day this is NOT broadcast material we're talking about, and i would say that among the many end viewers of my work there's probably not a single one who might even / ever question whether the pics could be even sharper.

i think a lot of time seems to be spent nowadays in searching for the perfect picture, regardless of content. rather like watching 'the human planet' with it's endless, breath-taking photography and meaningless chatter passing as narration. after a while one simply tires of pretty pictures, but NEVER of an interesting story.

shields up.... ;-)

[Phil Lee]

Hi

Originally Posted by Leslie Wand

i just have to throw in my luddite's 2cnts worth....

i've followed this thread, and many more of similar ilk on a number of forums, and even tried quite a number of workflow suggestions that promised a 'real' hd experience in sd...

quite frankly i find it all a bit of a black cat in a dark room - sd isn't hd, and never will be.
going from hdv (pal) to sd dvd via vegas's normal route (and even from avchd source material), gives me results that are almost indistinguishable from some of the most convoluted workflows listed and experimented with.

at the end of the day this is NOT broadcast material we're talking about, and i would say that among the many end viewers of my work there's probably not a single one who might even / ever question whether the pics could be even sharper.

i think a lot of time seems to be spent nowadays in searching for the perfect picture, regardless of content. rather like watching 'the human planet' with it's endless, breath-taking photography and meaningless chatter passing as narration. after a while one simply tires of pretty pictures, but NEVER of an interesting story.

shields up.... ;-)

I quite agree, it's a black art and I've not found any method that produces great interlaced SD from HD, just methods that trade off one negative for another, even then it depends on the footage.

Going from HD progressive acquired footage to SD progressive you can get fantastic results producing something akin to commercial DVDs, it's just that with interlaced HD made progressive, resized then made interlaced again just doesn't work that well as the interlaced fields will not knit back together cleanly.

Regards

Phil

[Brian Luce]

Who says it's not going to broadcast? I do a lot of DRTV, most of the world is still SD, so this stuff matters to me.

And for a lot of us, there *is* a major difference between what Vegas yields from it's MPEG2 and what you get from something with a better scaling engine like TMPG.

But if staying in Vegas meets your requirements, then by all means hang with it. But for some of us, it just doesn't look that great so we look to other programs to get us where we want to be image wise.

[Chris Harding]

Hey Leslie

No need for shields at all from my side!!

I agree entirely..if you want pristine HD video then use a BD player with a BD disk ..end of story. I really don't think there is any "magic formula" to make a downsized image look as good ..no matter what you do!!

I put a post up on a local Ozzie Wedding Forum to get the answer from the horse's mouth (the bride's themselves) and the general concensus seems to be that they don't really care and when hubby has insisted on watch HD they say that they really can't see the difference!!! ("Maybe it's my eyes" was one comment!!) The bottom line is that most viewers tend to be following the storyline, admiring the bridesmaids and shedding a few tears along the way and generally enjoying the re-living of magical moments. They are not squinting at the screen 6" away muttering that the resolution could be better or the editor might have done a better done with the colour matching. It's all content related and if you do a good job on the content and audio, any technical aspects are thrown out the window.

I have been shooting now for 3 seasons in HD and supplying every bride with an SD DVD and never once have quality issues ever arisen..even when the light was suspect ... I have done photoshoots in mid-day sun at 40 degrees with the harshest possible shadows and the sort of conditions that we would never shoot in unless we had to....and what did the bride have to say??? " Chris, I was absolutely blown away when I watched the photoshoot video..it was awesome!!!"

Sometimes I truly think we are way too technical for our own good but really Phil, Chris and others your efforts were indeed still gratefully appreciated!!!

You end result may look like a "crap shoot" to you but to the viewer it's an Oscar winner..so what's wrong with that????

Chris

[Christopher Young]

Mr Wand! You are getting as cynical as me :-) How are you?

Just tried Phil's method in Vegas 10. MainConcept PAL DVD, 9000 av, 9500 peak, 2 pass VBR from 16:9 SD YUV .avi with reduce interlace flicker which was rendered upper field as suggested. Rendered the same file in MC Reference using the PAL DVD settings with the noise reduction and SCD set as per my previous post. Sorry to say Phil the MC Reference mpeg kills the Vegas one in all of the following areas. Sharpness, aliasing and noise on either the PC or TV. The MC Reference DVD is well above anything I can get out of Vegas, Edius, TMPG and numerous other mpeg encoders including the much vaunted CinemaCraft encoder.

The end user answer I guess is for Chris in WA and Phil in London to to Sendspace.com me some 250~300MB HD files which they are familiar with and let me encode them. I can then upload them as MPEG-2 files so they can download and compare results with what they are getting and comment back to the forum. Have to restrict it to just a couple of examples in case I get swamped with requests.

Sendspace<dot>com will take uploads of up to 300MB free of charge. If Chris and Phil want to try this experiment just upload some HD files I will then download, process and re-upload them as MPGEG-2 files. Before uploading you will need to contact me first for my email address. I will also need your email addresses for the MPEG uploads. I can be contacted via email through:

CYV Productions, Chris Young Camera Crews - Equipped Cameramen/Videographers Australia - New South Wales/ACT - film tv production

[Harry Simpson]

I started this particular thread and of course SD won't look as good as HD. My experience was that SD converted from HD 1080p looked terrible - worse than any video I'd ever seen!
I finally found this recipie but was wondering where I could do it less painfully. (burning BluRay is a piece of cake!)
Video: HD to SD DVD Workflow
*******************
1. 1920x1080p .MOV from camera (Canon 5dmk2)
2. Cineform HDLink
Maintian source frame format
High Quality
Render to 1920x1080p .AVI
3. In Vegas bring in the .AVI file to the timeline
4. Edit video, titles, filters ect to the movie
5. Render from Vegas to file using format: Video for Windows (*.avi) using the Lagarith (create a Custom template) Keep the video full size 1920x1080p Pixel ar of 1.000
6a. In VirtualDub, pull in this AVI file and set resize filter added to Lanczos scaler to 854x480 (match origianl AR)
6b. In VirtualDub, also choose Compression for output to Lagarith (or HuffYUV AVI though I've not testing this)
6c. In VirtualDub still - now save the AVI file
7. Open Vegas up and pull in this new 854x480 .avi file (did notice that sound did not make it back from VirtualDub in the 854x480 .avi ??) So added sound from an earlier file.
8. Rendered out to MPEG2 by Selecting the Make DVD option from the Render Movie screen.
9. Select send to DVD Architect at the prompt.
10. DVD Architect opens up with the one file as the one chapter.
11. Prepared and burned the DVD to a Memorex DVD-R.
12. Tested the DVD in my older DVD player.
13. Loaded great, colors looked a little over saturated from the original. Sound sounded great and was synced.

[Ron Evans]

I just tried a test of Main Concept Reference V2.2 from the WEB site with the trial MPEG2 pack. I edit in Edius mainly so my starting point was a 40 min ski holiday Canopus HQ fine file. 1920x1080 60i NTSC.

I had already encoded/downconverted with TMPGenc T4 so used the same settings in Main Concept so that I could compare like for like. Settings were video VBR 2 pass, max bit rate 8000, average bit rate 7000, 10bit precision.

There is very little difference that I can see. Honestly I prefer TMPGenc. The TMPGenc has more sparkle.

At 5 times the price I would like it to be startlingly different. The difference to TMPGenc is not obvious to me whereas the export/downconvert from Vegas or Edius is clearly inferior.

Playback was from an upscaling PS3 to a Panasonic 1920x1080 plasma over HDMI and a Sony BDP-S360 to a Sony 240hz 40" LCD again upscaled over HDMI.


Ron Evans

[Chris Harding]

Hi Guys

When doing commercial stuff like weddings I also need to consider time!! If a particular method makes the end DVD look say, 10% better but takes me an extra 10 hours in the workflow then it's hardly worth the effort!!!

ChrisY??? Thanks for the offer but I have an aquaintance that says he has Version 5 of MC that works well for him. I'll pop over with a file and see what the result is???? Would you suggest that I export the timeline to MXF for this test???? If so, any particular setting that need to be adhered to????

I'll let you know the results later as I have a whole bunch of Realty shoots to do today!!

Thanks

Chris