HDV to WMV HD suggestions
 

Hi, I'm looking for some settings suggestions to take 1080i from a Z1u. I work for a university and we are doing an oral history project with many interviews. The project is on Cold War Technology. Anyway, I have the original taped interviews, and as I do the interviews I also am making some DVDs of each interview for easy viewing. I thought that it also might be good to make some WMV HD video files for another viewing/archiving format. At this time I think the library is just going to archive the interviews, I don't think there is any kind of documentary or other produced video in the works. Usually the video is used for others to research. Anyway I degress.
Any suggestions for the best settings in Media Encoder to make the highest quality WMV HD files?

Thanks,

David

Are you editing in native HDV, or Cineform CFHD codec??

Why not encode the finished projects back to MPEG2-TS for eventual burning to blue-laser DVDs? That'll be a lot faster than encoding to WMV for a given level of quality, and with hard drives so cheap these days the amount of storage required shouldn't be a problem.

If you do use WMV try encoding to 1280x720 resolution with a bit rate of ~6-8 Mbps. That will be easier to play on more devices than WMV at 1080p resolution, and take a lot less time to render.

Since I am using Premiere Pro 1.5, I'm using the Cineform codec that it is bundled with. The only editing that I am doing is maybe trimming the beginning and end.
I like the Blue-Ray idea, but at this time I am tied down by a university budget. Which is frozen at this time. I have offered the harddrive option, but haven't heard back from the client yet, since they are working with a strict grant budget for the project. For now, I think I will go try 720 option. That was were I was confused, which one to choose taking in account quality, space and ease
of playback. Thanks for the input. This is our first HD project and I am working between what I would like to do and what the Library (my client) wants.

somewhere on dvinfo.net there is a link to the latest microsoft pages on encoding vc-1 for hd, which allows you to keep the 1080i interlaced format, with far better picture quality than you'll ever get with an mpeg2 format.

since you can't actually create an hd dvd yet, especially with no budget for authoring software, i would confirm that your footage is intended for tv viewing, so keeping the interlaced format is o.k.... then just create a vc-1 file at a super-high archival bitrate... i think that the microsoft vc-1 encoder is free.

Dan,

I may be mistaking but isn't Barlow discussing creating an effective HD-DVD in this thread.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=66052

Ken

My point was to encode to MPEG2-TS at 1080i resolution because that can be used at a later date to make HD DVDs with maximum quality, if/when funding becomes available to do so. Encoding to Windows Media HD will take much, much longer for an equivalent level of quality, while the extra hard drive space required to store MPEG2 shouldn't cost much unless you have a very large amount of finished video. A 300 GB hard drive holding over 25 hours of MPEG2 HD shouldn't cost more than ~$125 or so, and seems like a good investment for this project. Make a duplicate copy of the drive when you're done for your archive.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm going to play around with making a WMV HD file. I'm having a little trouble taking the m2t file from DVRack and putting into PPro 1.5 to make into a WMV HD file. I think the plan is to keep the original tape master, not using it for viewing and saving it for future projects. Making a regular DVD for viewing and information, and then I'll also make a WMV HD file for a higher end viewable file in another format just as a back up.

Thanks.

ken, i saw the beginning of that barlow thread, thanks for pointing it out again.

it's a fascinating concept... i didn't realize that dvdsp4 was hd-capable... most dvd authoring apps would gag on the 1080i frame size that he was using.

Back to the original question
 

This brings three questions: Which Format; which througput ? which mode ( CBR,VBR)?

IMO
you do NOT want to choose among formats, but to produce three of them to be used in different circumstances

a/ best definition : 1080p , today needs a "big " CPU , to morrow will play on all HD-DVD thanks to harware decoders.
Recommanded throughput : 9.5 Mbps, because it keeps all the details
than HDV is capable of ( in MPEG2 @20Mbps) ( and more), and because it can be played from a standard DVD too.

b/ " Low HD" ie 720p, because indeed as sayed above it plays on most CPUs. IF you have a "low HD" lcd, plasma or projector, you will not notice much difference with th ehigher def, due to this limitation (as for to day, but next year...)
Recommanded throughput : 6.5 Mbps CBR or 5.5Mbps VBR depending upon your trade off between encoding time and DiskSpace.

c/ "Quarter def" is a format which i produce often because it is Very Compact, Tolerable in terms of quality .and easy to stream/download."Quarter Def" is indeed 870 * 540 ( one fourth of 1940 * 1080) . If you come from HDV you will want to use non-square pixel as in the MPEG , which will result in an actual 720 *540. Encoding is simple, quality is PRETTY GOOD ( probably just as good as or better than SD! ) and as the recommended throughput is any where between 1.5Mbps and 1.9Mbps, the compactness of the file is stunning.

This being said, one last point, VERY important. Rather than exporting ( and rendering ) three times, I much prefer to export in Cineform format my rendering, once, and then encode it into the three format above. With the help of TMPGEnc Express ( nice GUI, fast compared to WMencoder, Batch capability, 59$..) it is a breeze