A codec question from a newb.
 

Guys im quite embarrassed to ask this after reading some of your posts its obvious im well out of my depth. But anyways. My brother-in law introduced me to videography and editing and I do quite like it.

At the moment I use a SD dv cam to capture footage, until i upgrade to a nice HD unit later this year. The problem I have is deciphering which video codec to use to out put to our media server in the main living room ( ps3 ) for the best possible quality. Ive been using xvid but Im pretty sure this isnt what I should be using.

Any advice on this matter would be hugely appreciated.

Dave.

Vegas has some nice AVC/Mpeg4 codecs. That is probably your best bet. Look for the Sony AVC or Mainconcept AVC.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

I recommend you use the H.264 available from MPEG_STREAMCLIP. The application is free, accepts virtually any input format, and does an excellent job of making high quality HD video with a minimum of required disk space.

That's a nice little utility. Too bad it doesn't understand the EX1 native files, or it would be really useful to me.

Correct me if I'm wrong Bill but doesn't this utility require that you convert an existing file? The problem I have is that let's say I do a HDV shoot, I gather up 10 or 15 .m2t files on my Vegas timeline, cut - splice, add some titles, do some color correction, etc and now I'm ready to export my new masterpiece into a 'final' format. How does a utility like Streamclip help me here? The only way I can make use of this is if I render my video into some format (Mpeg2,4,H.264,etc) and THEN import the already compressed completed file into this program to recommpress it a second time?

That just doesn't seem to make any sense. Unless a codec is installed as part of my NLE software, it just doesn't seem to do a lot of good to encode it after the fact. Unless I suppose it accepts a *TRUE* uncompressed file as a source.

Jon

Mpeg Streamclip didn't like the uncompressed HD I threw at it but seemed Ok with cineform Raw and ProResHQ. Not sure it's worth it to encode to an intermmediate then use the utility, but it is possible.

Well, it's good to know it'll accept Cineform and ProRes, that's a surprise actually. I'm currently working with Cineform files and am pretty happy about it. The streamclip people really need to come up with an export plugin to Vegas, PPro, etc. If their encoding quality is that much superior to Mainconcept, Sony AVC, etc.

Jon

Who says it is?

how does this program work when im looking to edit my work in Vegas etc? Surely Vegas must have an output codec that is high enough quality for SD.

What codec did you guys use before you all went HD :P

For SD, all my source as DV-AVI so I rendered to DV-AVI. The sony DV codec holds up extremely well across multiple renders plus the sections that were not changed are simply copied to the new file resulting in zero change. For going to DVD, I then rendered from my source DV-AVI to MPEG2 and also get good results.

You specifically mentioned the PS3 in your post and did get answers appropriate for that. In reality, there is no absolute "answer" for your question.

So sorry for you guys stuck with Vegas. In avid media Composer, I can essentially do what amounts to a frameserve to MPEG_STREAMCLIP. Saves me a render and happens quite quickly. Why can't you frameserve with Satish's plugin?

For some reason, most H.264 converters I've tried get the luma conversion wrong.

Just to clarify, my ps3 supports these codecs natively.

* Memory Stick Video Format
* - MPEG-4 SP (AAC LC)
* - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile （AAC LC）
* - MPEG-2 TS（H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, AAC LC）
* MP4 file format
* - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile (AAC LC)
* MPEG-1 (MPEG Audio Layer 2)
* MPEG-2 PS (MPEG2 Audio Layer 2, AAC LC, AC3(Dolby Digital), LPCM)
* MPEG-2 TS（MPEG2 Audio Layer 2, AC3（Dolby Digital）, AAC LC）
* MPEG-2 TS（H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, AAC LC）
* AVI
* - Motion JPEG (Linear PCM)
* - Motion JPEG (μ-Law)
* AVCHD （.m2ts / .mts）
* DivX
* WMV
* - VC-1（WMA Standard V2）


And probably every codec going if I transcode from the PC, although I prefer to store movies on the PS3. So which from the above would you recommend I use?