Originally Posted by Paul Kellett (Post 844383)

Piotr.
Edius or Vegas ? which do you prefer ?
Also you've rendered to MPEG-2 obviously but have you actually burnt it to DVD and watched it on tv ?

Paul

Originally Posted by Steve Sykes (Post 844130)

Dennis can you frameserve to MPEG streamclip from your NLE? Can you expand on your workflow using this method. Did you export the "squared 5" MPEG streamclip straight to MPEG2 for a SD DVD or did you create an intermediate file or frameserve to another encoder?

Originally Posted by Jacob Nielsen (Post 843013)

No need for intermediate renders. I use Debugmode Frameserver. Frameserve to avi from vegas, open that avi in Frameserver and use whatever resize filter settings you want. Frameserve from Virtualdub and and encode this avi from TMPG encoder. Voila!

Originally Posted by Steven Thomas (Post 848830)

Have you downloaded Debugmode's latest frameserver software?
I have and it works great with Sony Vegas 8.0B to Procoder 3.

Originally Posted by Steve Sykes (Post 848802)

I have tried to frameserve to MPEG streamclip from Vegas but it produces black video. I tried this using debugmode frameserver. Can anyone confirm frameserving will definetely not work, I want to cut down on the use of intermediate files to save hard drive space! I like the method Jacob uses:

It's a shame that this doesn't work with MPEG streamclip if the resizing conversion is even better than virtualdubs.

Have people found a 'best method' that works from this thread? I have noticed that comments have stopped recently. ATM I'll be using Jacob's method for large video footage. For small amounts of footage, rendering to a lossy avi, then to Mpeg Streamclip. If I buy the MPEG2 codec for Quicktime will Mpeg Streamclip export to DVD MPEG2 or will it still be better to export to export to another avi then use TMPGenc or similar to render to MPEG? As you can see there are too many stages!

Dennis, I would still like to know how you used MPEG streamclip in your workflow!?

Why can't NLE's have better conversion algorithms, it seems crazy to think that free third party software can do a better job!

Originally Posted by Jon Carlson (Post 848867)

Is it just me or is there a bit of an elephant in the room here? Major studios and large production companies stopped shooting SD a while ago, even if their final output medium was still SD DVD or whatever.

Take, for example, The Office (US Version... my apologies to all the fans of the original). This is shot with an F900 in 60i. We know from Adam Wilt's comparison tests that the EX1, while not competitive with the F900 per se, generates roughly similar amounts of detail.

When it's scaled down to SD DVD release, it looks pretty freakin' good. Same original image size (1920 x 1080), same native chip resolution, similar detail levels. I find it hard to believe that the difference between 2/3" CCD sensors and a 1/2" CMOS sensors is to blame. Nor do I think it's the XDCAM EX codec.

That leaves post-production and processing as the source of the troubles.

So, what are larger studios and production companies using that we haven't discussed yet?

Originally Posted by Adam Forgione (Post 848910)

yes i agree, what are they using

Originally Posted by Dennis Schmitz (Post 848915)

I don't think that their scaler are any better than the ones used in virtualdub.
Virtualdub beats many very expensive programs in terms of picture quality...

And many commercial SD-DVDs are suffering from the low DVD-resolution and show the same artifacts of course.


regards Dennis

Originally Posted by Steve Sykes (Post 848951)

Apparently TMPGEnc 4 Express also has resize options such as the Lancosz3 filter so I presume this will be identical to using virtualdub? I have TMPGEnc 2.5 so I don't have this feature.