Compressing after rendering

[Philippe Gosselin]

Well here's a quick update.

I just learned that my client wants his project on a DVD to be projected on a television.

Problem is , I don't have a television and obviously don't have time to buy one until thursday.

Now , if I understood Glenn's tutorial correctly I will have to leave the 7.5 IRE setting ON in the waveform window because DVD player display black starting at 7.5.

Also , i know I am shooting in the dark here, but which broadcast color settings should be best suited to ensure proper display on a television set.

Thanks guys

Phil

[Dan Euritt]

Originally Posted by Philippe Gosselin

Dan : Glenn does mention about studio rgb→computer rgb but thanks for the heads up.

the point i made is that using that studio rgb→computer rgb conversion can blow the highlight details right out of your picture, which was not mentioned in glenn's otherwise well-written faq... it can also darken the lower end of gamma spectrum to the point where a lot of visual detail is lost in a sea of black... i'm talking about viewing the clips on a computer monitor, of course.

so don't run around automatically applying it to everything that you put on the web... test the clip before you encode it.

a related question along those lines is whether or not things like the windows media encoder performs a studio rgb→computer rgb conversion on the footage... vegas will read wmv files in the timeline, for purposes of testing the 0-255 range with the waveform monitor.

btw, many thanks to dse and glenn for providing us with resources like that.

glenn, here is a url to do a visual comparison on the embedded vs. full screen gamma ranges... now that i'm looking at it on an uncalibrated monitor, i don't see a lot of differences? http://www.dragracingtv.com/vw-drag-racing.html

timo is rather, um, controversial, lol, but the main thing to get from his website is the sections on monitor calibration and test patterns... there is no better site on the 'net for doing that... his downloadable test pattern files will check out perfectly on the vegas waveform monitor, at their native 800x600 resolution, and they are far better than anything you'll find in vegas, for the purposes of setting up computer monitors.

[Milt Lee]

Well, it's clear that I need to do some reading, and I hope I'm not too late for this thread, but I have a question about this Mpeg4 thing.

I have started posting for rocketboom.com and they are heavily into the mac world. They like to have things done in mpeg4. Their recommendation was 3ivx 4.5 for encoding. I have tried using it and can't really make it work right at all. I'm totally up for trying Nero - do I need to get the pro version?

Last night I worked like a beaver trying all kinds of settings with 3ivx - finally I used WMV set for 3megs, 256 kbs for the audio, and sent the piece off. It really looked great, and I guess my question is can you get good looking quicktime files out of Vegas? I would love to see some comparisions between similarly encoded video - same playback rates - same material. I really don't want to buy an apple just to do mpeg4. I have no desire to leave Vegas. It's just too fine.

Milt

[Milt Lee]

Opps, I went to Spot's article, and it appears this entire discussion is about High Def!! Wow, I really didn't get that. I guess I thought that we were talking about webcasting. I think I'll reread the thread.

Milt

[Dan Euritt]

this thread is not about hi-def.

nero h.264 will blow the doors off of anything that you can do with quicktime in vegas... i think that you can download nero to test it out, it's only $65 to buy it?

[Milt Lee]

Thanks! I'm going to do just that - you know last night I went to Wikipedia and read up on it and finally got that this thread was indeed not really about Hi Def.

I also went to the Nero site and found out more. Yep, looks like a must have kinda deal.

take care,
Milt Lee

[Dan Euritt]

i bet that a lot of what we have been talking about here is applicable to hi-def, tho.

if you look at the footage in that link i posted a couple of threads up, it's full-frame 640x480, 30 fps, @ 418 kbps... the video portion was encoded at ~370 kbps... it's right on the edge of marginal quality, which is how you want to do it for the web.

i'd guess that you should be able to match or exceed the quality of the video portion of those files with nero h.264... the audio, however, will not be as good as wmv 9 audio... you can also buy quicktime pro, which has h.264 capability, and it may be accessible via the vegas timeline, don't know what the quality is like tho.

be sure and always choose two-pass encoding for both video and audio, whenever possible, and preferably vbr as well.

[Ron Evans]

Philippe the only time you need to worry about 7.5 IRE setup is if you are going to record to an old analogue tape deck. If your source is digital video it is at the equivalent of 0 IRE and while in the digital domain should stay there. That means editing and output to other digital formats including DVD. Digital decks and DVD players apply setup on their analogue output to TV's. In rgb terms the TV range is really 16 to 235 so computer graphics need to bear this in mind and not use super blacks or super whites though most modern TV's will happily play back these levels without much problems. Don't apply 7.5 setup to your DVD or it will look very washed out.

Ron Evans

[Philippe Gosselin]

Thanks Ron ,


Now that makes it perfectly clear :)

[Philippe Gosselin]

Dan : Thank you for pointing me to Nero Recode , I just got it today and from the first couple of experiment I just did I can already tell you that it succeedds in almost every aspects.

Spot: Well my computer doesn't have the same specs as yours so I can't really say that it is fast . One hour to recode a one minute video with two-pass turned on. But the quality is there though .

I ended up with a 14 meg file with the original resolution(720x480) and it looks stunning. It is impossible to compare this one with my previous projects. In fact I will re-encode them through Nero , it will save space on my server and the quality will be better , it is really the best of both worlds. My feeling about the "washing out" on my images is now gone

Thank you guys for all your time.

I will fiddle a bit more with the program but once my final test is done and on my website I will post a link in this thead.

Until then have a great week-end.

Phil

[Milt Lee]

I'm going to get Nero too, based on what I've heard here. I can't seem to get a trial version right now. I think they've been swamped, but I'm going to buy it sight unseen, based on my previous experience with Nero.

Milt

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

You won't regret Nero, particularly for the H.264 stuff. For MPEG, frankly...I don't know why you'd not be happy with Vegas but to each his own, I guess.

[Milt Lee]

Well, it's late and I need to get to bed, but briefly, whenever I've tried to encode in Quicktime, it always looks strange - and the biggest problem I have is the sound - which generally sucks when I encode for QT.

Now the reality is I have never been told the most wonderful settings to use, so it may very well be that I just don't know what I'm doing. I'll admit that I've never gone to school to study these things, and all my information is pretty much trial and error.

If any of you have a great setting in Vegas for mpeg4 - or something that will play in Quicktime - I would LOVE to hear it.

thanks,
Milt

[Dan Euritt]

Originally Posted by Philippe Gosselin

I ended up with a 14 meg file with the original resolution(720x480) and it looks stunning.

go back and re-read the wmv settings i just posted... you want 640x480 for computers, not 720x480, because the latter is the rectangular pixel size used in ntsc video, while computers use square pixels(640x480).

on paper, there is no resolution loss with a change to square pixels.

nero h.264 should work fine in the quicktime player... no need to use vegas mpeg4, although it would be nice to not have to export the avi first, in order to use nero.

[Philippe Gosselin]

Hi Dan ,


Thanks for the advice. I wouldn't post anything in 720x480 anyway because of the high bandwidth usage it produces , this was merely a test. Most of my projects ended up in 320x240 because my clients want to reduce bandwidth costs also.

I am not sure I follow you when you say you had to render to AVI first . With the tutorial that Spot sent me to I didn't render at all. I created a frameserve file in Vegas and opened up Nero and it did the rest. Worked like a charm.


Milt:

Well I didn't go to school either . Camera , editing , encoding etc ... It's all learned on my own and occasionnally with the superb help from boards like this one. So go ahead and try. Personnally I wouldn't waste my time with Quicktime. The h.264 you will get using Nero Recode can be read by any players including QT.

I just followed the tutorial and everything was fine . I still experiment with it but with the tutorial all the basics are covered , the rest is pretty much to suit you own tastes and particularities.

Phil