<<<-- Originally posted by Glen Elliott : I'd have to assume he specifically chose a lower compression to show of the sheer detail in his HD cam, as these are some of the most clear, sharp images I've ever seen in a WMV. However I can understand how, at this compression...or lack there-of, would make it impossible to view for our 56k'ers. -->>>

Exactly right. I used Variable Bit Rate encoding (VBR) with a quality level set at 86 on the first clip and 83 on the second. The native mpeg ts file is about 120Mb and the WMP9 file is down to 41Mb. That about 3/1 ratio with very little quality loss.

Mike

You can read my review of the 4 DVD set here: http://www.dvinfo.net/articles/post/troxel1.php

There is a 2 DVD set available at http://www.vegastrainingandtools.com and you can read my review of that set at: http://www.dvinfo.net/articles/post/troxel2.php

They are both very good and complement each other very well.

All footage is 30 frames (or 25 if you are in PAL land) per second
for an editor. Any. However, they can INTERPRET the footage
as being 60i, 50i, 30p or 25p (or 24p if you have such a camera).

It is ALL about INTERPRETING the footage. All CURRENT streams
are ALWAYS saved as 30 or 25 FRAMES a second in a DV stream
(even for 24p footage).

That being said, you must tell the application what to do with
your footage. Some people already gave some excellent advice
when you want to convert your footage from interlaced to
progressive.

MAKE SURE that all your settings are CORRECT and the SAME.
This means: the project settings, the footage settings AND
the OUTPUT settings!! (which a lot of people seem to forget
about).

I always shoot in frame mode and thus have the Vegas project
set to 25p (I'm in PAL land). My clips are automatically imported
as 25p so I don't need to change anything here. HOWEVER,
my export defaults to 50i which I need to change to 25p.

If you want to edit interlaced make sure everything is set
to 60i or 50i (PAL).

I hope this explained it a bit more.

Federico is correct. Here is the table:

VCD: NTSC=320x240, PAL=352x288 (MPEG1)
SVCD: NTSC=480x480, PAL=480x576 (MPEG2)
DVD: NTSC=720x480, PAL=720x576 (MPEG2)

All NTSC stuff is running at 30p/60i and PAL at 25p/50i.

If you want a higher resolution go with SVCD (most DVD
players can play that now-a-days and it still is a normal CD)
or DVD.

VCD is just that low a resolution, nothing you can do about that.

What do you mean with "no overlay" or "overlay preview".
Overlay is generally used when describing that the video card
takes care of getting the pixels into the video buffer instead
of your program.

Remember that you can undock Vegas' preview window and
make it fullscreen on another monitor (or TV) if Windows sees
it as a multiple screen configuration.

As others have said, I'd trust my firewire output any day over
a video cards conversion from a PC resolution with a non-
interlaced signal to a TV resolution with interlaced signal.

Also make sure you are using the latest version of Vegas (4.0d).

I just made an MPG from a sequence in a project I'm working on in Vegas. I noticed that in WMP the footage was actually displaying the correct aspect ratio which is odd. Technically it should be displayed slightly fat due to the rectangular to square pixel conversion.
Now that leads me on to my concern. With this project (wedding) I'm using the workflow of doing the project in sections and rendering them out as separate AVI's, then when finished assembling them in order on the timeline to be rendered out to MP2. When I finish one of these sections I chose File>Render As> Video For Windows (AVI). The only setting I change is quality which I change to "best". Now is there anything I need to change by way of pixel aspect ratio so that it turns out correctly on the TV....or is that set by default already. I'm just worried because this is the first big project I did in Vegas and have yet to output to see the results as I'm not finished with it yet.

If you didn't import weird footage and you set the correct
pixel aspect in the MPEG encoder then all should be well. My
experience is to NOT trust WMP with regards to pixel aspects,
especially with mpeg files!!

I view my mpeg2 files ONLY with a software DVD player like
WinDVD or PowerDVD to make sure it gets displayed OK.

When mpeg encoding you can set the pixel aspect as well
which must be 4:3 for normal footage or 16:9 for 16:9 footage.

Everything else should be taken care off!

Rob, I'm using the results I got from using Premiere/Procoder combo. Those MPG1 files looked slightly fat- which is completly normal due to the pixel conversion. However when I encoded an AVI I output from Vegas in Procoder it displays correctly for once. It's the fact the the aspect look correct which, ironicly enough, threw me off.
If my final output looks odd when I play the DVD on the TV you guys will be the first to hear about it. I just like to know what's happening at all stages of my workflow- I don't like *not* knowing why something is happening.

Why aren't you keeping it all in Vegas? I've had no problems
with this approach going from my XL1s through editing and
then down to SVCD (also MPEG2).

The Matrox Parhelia has a full calibration routine for NTSC and output is extremely hiqh quality.

I have hooked up an M-Audio Sonica USB device. It was a pain
to get it installed but works flawless now! I haven't tried the
5.1 mode though since my receiver is not at my present location.

M-Audio makes some very nice products.

Just wanted to make a quick MPG1 out of a 3 minute montage I did. Procoder is like 5x faster than Vegas's MPG encoder.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15158

It might be fast and it certainly is a better encoder in my
opinion, but it seems to put problems in your path. Try making
a short mpeg with Vegas first and see if you have the same
problems there. It might well be that procoder isn't able to
use input pixel aspects other then 1.0 (I don't if that is the case)
or there is something else going wrong. Using an original
vegas encoded file you might be able to better narrow it down!

My primary laptop screen is doing 1400x1050 (LCD). I have a
CRT monitor hooked up to my laptop that is doing 1024x768,
very handy to have the scopes on there and other things.

I never want anything lower then 1400x1050 for my primary
screen again, ever.

Most laptops I've seen only have 1 firewire port. But that usually
isn't that much of a problem since the firewire drives have two.

I'm doing all editing etc. on a DELL Latitude laptop running WinXp.
My Lady X episode was done on that. Worked like a charm. I'm
running a 160 GB Maxtor firewire drive with it though.

Well it's not technically a "problem" per-say. Actually displaying in the correct aspect (not making the subject look fat) is a good thing. It's just the fact that all my previous mpgs didn't display this way (ones which source footage I edited in Premiere). All my older footage that was edited in Premiere (the ones whos MPG1 encodings came out looking slightly stretched) always looked perfect when output as MPG2 to the TV. So if you understand my thought process- if the MPG1s that looked stretched on the computer monitor came out perfect on the TV, will the MPG1s that look perfect on the computer monitor come out stretched on the TV? *follow me* hehe. That was what I was trying to explain.

I'm just vocalizing a concern. When it comes to paid gigs I turn into a worry-wort anytime something happens that I don't understand.
Thanks for the input Rob.

Yeah when you get spoiled by high resolutions it's hard to go back. Everything seems so HUGE and cluttered.

I gave a demo through a data projector recently and had to reduce display to 800 x 600.

It was horrible - claustrophobic - it felt like Alice in Wonderland - everything was different!

Glen,

The best way to find out is to try it. In my experience everything has looked correct on the TV no matter what I do in Vegas. Straight PTT, preview, or going to DVD all shows correctly. Similarly whenever I have rendered to WMV or MOV they also show correctly. Maybe Vegas is simply properly setting a flag so the media play displays correctly.

So can we see the highlight anywhere then?

It depends on what you are doing and the speed of your processor
mostly. Color correction is in expensive effect in terms of CPU
usage and is also depedend on the type of footage you are
correcting.

If you do NOTHING to your footage Vegas can just pump the
DV stream out through firewire. As SOON as you add a
transition or filter it must do the following:

1. decompress the DV frame
2. apply whatever effects you have running
3. compress the frame into DV again
4. send it out over firewire

So in this case it must do 3 extra steps which are quite
CPU expensive.

Why I usually do is the following. I'm working on frames when
color correcting. If a frame looks good I check a couple of other
frames in the shot which usually turn out fine as well. I can
keyframe the effect at certains major frames in the shot to get
it working basically.

Then when I'm doing correcting a sequence or that particular
scene I render out a DV file of that and then have that playback
(which is then again in realtime) over the firewire to my TV.

This work flow works quite okay for me because I don't need to
see realtime moving images with color correction when I'm
setting the filters up. I can check a couple of still frames. Then
when I'm done I can view the whole shot/sequence and look
at it in the bigger picture.

One advantage is that this takes me away from my computer
and actually has me really looking at the footage as a whole
as well.

I currently have a P4 2.4 GHz system with 512KB RAM. I'm considering increasing the RAM to 1GB. Anyone have any firsthand experience with respect to overall Vegas performance when increasing RAM? Am I likely to notice any improvement or would my $$$ be better spent elsewhere? tia

You will not see much difference UNLESS:

1) You are running multiple instances of Vegas or

2) You need a longer amount of time for RAM Previews


What are you trying to speed up? Rendering? Playing from the timeline? Something else?

Maybe Vegas is simply properly setting a flag so the media play displays correctly.

Hmm very good point. Quite a possibility.

at first I had 512 MB of RAM in my system and I upgraded it to 1 GB of RAM. When rendering I did not notice a thing, just about 10 seconds faster on a total duration of 28 minutes of rendering time. So that is peanuts.
In my eyes it only makes a difference when there are many applications open, like photoshop, vegas, etc, maybe then you use more than the 512 MB you have now.

I have 1G of RAM in my computer. Vegas in general will not be faster or use the additional memory. I have set mine up with a 512MB RAM preview that I use often to speed up my work for checking edits. This is why I got the extra memory.

Randall

Finished it last night. A wedding that took me close to twice as long beings I'm still becoming aclimated with the new workflow. I used a workflow similar to Edwards in that I did each part of the program in sections. When completed I assembled them on the timeline and encoded the MP2 (DVDA Template)@ 7mb/s constant bitrate, then wave (PCM) for audio...I had plenty of space and heard that AC3 can attenuate the audio. Did a simple "single movie" template in DVDA and burned it. Popped it in and it played perfect. Some of my color corrections are a bit light but that could be because of the discrepency between the little 13" TV I edit on and my 36" HD Wega I was watching it on.
I wasn't sure if it was going to work because I read over at the SoFo forums that you have to remove Veritas burning software because it conflicts with DVDA. I didn't seem to affect me at all, thankfully.

Lastly I do have one question however. When I encoded my video (MP2 @ 7 mb/s) in Vegas then imported it into DVDA...I do have to go to "Optimize DVD" and change some settings. I saw that the default bit-rate was 8mb/s. What if I had left it at 8 even though the MP2 I encoded was at 7. Whould it have to be re-rendered? I'd naturally think YES, however when I changed the slider the file never displayed an exclamation point only the green check like it was compliant.
Oddly enough when building the disk it took about 10 minutes even before it started burning, is this normal? It said "rendering" in the dialog during this time yet both my video and audio had green checks and I didn't choose to "re-sample video". Is this step just building the DVD, and should it take 10 minutes. In all burning a DVD from start to finish @ 2x took 35 minutes! Is that normal? What kind of times do you guys get?

Glen,

Congratulations on finishing your project!

Only certain parts of Veritas software will conflict. Apparently you don't have those parts installed. Specifically anything relating to DLA.

As for the Optimize, if you pass it a valid file, it will NOT be re-rendered so the slider makes no difference. Just make sure the Optimize screen says that it does not need to be rendered (i.e. a green checkmark beside it).

Unless you told it otherwise, DVDA probably converted the audio to AC-3 anyway. It does this by default. I have noticed no difference between the original WAV and the AC-3. If you ever want to do 5.1, you HAVE to go to AC-3.

That sounds like a decent render and burn time to me.

So what your saying is that "prepare" time was the audio being converted to AC-3? I think I found a setting to make it use WAV though. Say if everything is set (in other words the MPG2 is compliant and the audio is as well- with no need to re-render) when you go to burn the disc should it still take ten minutes or so before actually beginning to burn? Does creating the Video and Audio TS folders, etc take that long to build?

<<<-- Originally posted by Glen Elliott : Does creating the Video and Audio TS folders, etc take that long to build? -->>>

Doesn't sound out of line. The audio and video have to be multiplexed together to create the large VOB files.

For the very first DVD, DVD-A appears to manipulate the MPEG-2 and audio files you've provided, into the appropriate burnable files. But it won't re-render proper files. These new files go in a temp directory. Once you've done this, you can do successive burns without repeating this step, and your throughput will be higher. That's why if you want to do a burn of a totally new DVD, it asks you if you want to overwrite the exisiting project files in the temp directory.

> Does creating the Video and Audio TS folders, etc take that long to build?

For a full DVD, yes, it can. It has to basically copy your source files and mux them into the .VOBs that get burned onto the DVD.

10 mins seems a little long though, it's usually 3-4 mins for me. The time difference was probably what someone mentioned above, converting your .wavs to AC3. Save some HD space, use AC3, nobody will be able to tell the difference.

In response to Edward's question, looking to speed up (reduce) rendering time.

Rendering time is all about CPU clock speed.

You can get a very marginal increase in speed from lowering your RAM timings. You have to do this through your motherboard's BIOS. There is a certain point where the quality of your RAM will limit how low you can go (system stability is affected). Quality RAM may let you achieve lower timings but it is likely not worth it. You can get a marginal increase in speed by running 4 sticks of single-sided RAM (same brand) instead of 2 sticks of RAM, but that probably isn't worth it either.

Is your Pentium processor a hyperthreading one? The newest Pentiums have a faster front side bus speed and hyperthreading, both which should speed up rendering. Unfortunately, you would need to pay for new RAM, processor, and possibly motherboard.

Another possibility for improving system performance is overclocking your system. You could get around 15%-50% improvement in system performance depending on how far you go without compromising system stability. If your motherboard allows it try running a 5:4 memory divider and running prime95 (free download) overnight to test system stability. Running the 5:4 memory divider will increase CPU speed by 25% and decrease RAM performance by a bit. There are some cheap improvements you can make to increase system performance further (or to get your computer stable if for some reason this change makes it unstable). The cheapest improvement is properly applying a tube of Radio Shack heat sink grease ($4?).

To speed up rendering you need:

1) A faster CPU
2) A faster hard drive
3) Faster busses between the various components.

IMO VCD is a little better then VHS ( no scan lines, white spec's) .. i use it often for works in progress as i do NOT want persons to have higher quality till project is finished .

also many commercials i've worked on i (also clients) view different edits on the web ( they post 352x240 mpeg1 ).

mpeg 1 plays pretty much on any computer and i have found VCD play in most DVD players.

we just sent out 30 SVCD's and 30 mpeg2/mpeg1/wmv9 data Cd's. 23 persons said they could not view SVCD on home DVD player ,
14 could not view mpeg 2 on computer ... 1 could not view mpeg 1, 17 could not view wmv9 ...

If you're not after auto play or menus, you can use CD for demos by creating WMV files at the original frame size. Try the 3 Mbps setting if space allows.

They will play in Media player, Alt/Enter makes them full screen and they can look fabulous.

If you use WMV9, viewers will need the latest Media Player, downloadable from MS.

Personally I'd swap 2 & 3 if you are talking the SYSTEM bus here
(not IDE bus like UATA 133 etc.). Faster CPU is the main thing
indeed for faster rendering times and more responsive environment.

VCD is quite good for those things indeed Don! I must say I have
a bit better track record with SVCD. Although I haven't send out
lots of discs to different people I have tested my last movie on
at least 5 players with no problems at all (one player is known
to have problems with some SVCD's). Most have the players
DID require me to hit the PLAY button explicitly for some reason.
(when you insert a DVD it plays it automatically).

Most players recognized the disc by showing SVCD on the screen
and then just waiting for me hitting play. Weird.

Also with a VCD or SVCD you can add menu's. I've never tried
this myself though.

Then I probably should have encoded to AC-3 from the start. I specifically chose WAV beings the program (even at 7mb/s) isn't in danger of filling the DVD.

If you gave it a WAV file and you told it to use PCM audio then I'm sure the audio was not encoded. However, it does take time to build the VOB files and any other background things. I think you are fine.

I wasn't trying to put them into any particular order - just listed them as I thought of them.

Here is a comparison: I have a desktop PIII 750MHz with 256 Meg RAM and 7200 RPM drive and a laptop PIV 2.8GHz with 1Gig RAM and 5400 RPM drive. I honestly don't know the bus speeds but imagine the laptop is faster. I also have a weekly program I edit that is very consistent from week to week.

Doing a PTT of this project on the desktop takes about 50 - 55 minutes in rendering time before the countdown screen. The PTT on the laptop took 15 - 20 minutes for the same task. This was expected.

However, if you do a full Render AS of the hour long project the timings get more interesting. The desktop unit will get done FASTER than the laptop because all of the unedited areas must be copied (which is the majority of the program) and the desktop unit does that MUCH faster.

Moral of the story? It's a combination of things that determines the final rendering speed to take all things into consideration. However, RAM is minimal in this equation.

I've been watching alot of peoples wedding videography work and there is one transition that I really like and believe it is on the FCP platform. It's like a blur/dislove/morph. Clip A blurs out and, for lack of better description, "morphs" into a blurred clip B then comes back into focus. Does Vegas have anything to simulate this effect other than manually setting keyframes to a guassian blur? What about the morph part- I'm assuming it can't do that.

Actually, if you want TRUE morphing check out WinMorph at http://www.debugmode.com. Satish has WinMorph, Plug-n-pac, and Frameserver available for Vegas.

However, if you look on the transitions tab, click on Cross Effect, what about the Cross Blur A/B transition?

I see your point Edward.... CPU & harddisk then. <g>

Has anyone looked into Bella’s DV Keyboard with the Vegas sticker set?

If you setup an autorun.ini file on your VCD then you can get it to automatically play with Windows Media Player on win95 systems and up. Search dvdrhelp.com on how to do this.

VCD is probably the most compatible.