I thought anytime you change the frame size of a video, then you're resizing. That's not correct? Meaning when you go from 1920x1080 to 720x480 (or whatever the correct dimensions are from a 16:9 DVD??) you're resizing the video frame, are you not?

I definitely do not understand the difference between downconverting and resizing. Apple seems to use the term (down converting) to describe aspect ratio conversion:

Downconverting HD Video

In my old world of RF communications, it described using a mixer to take a signal to a lower, intermediate frequency (IF).

I don't think the OP really cares, however. The question is whether the problems that lead to the Handbrake tutorial were in the AVC/MP4 codec, or whether they were in the resizing process itself and therefore would apply to other encoders as well, specifically (the OP asks) MPEG-2?

The answer is quite clear: the problem had nothing whatsoever to do with MP4 encoding and were entirely in the resizing operation. In fact, almost all of the discussions centered around how to make a decent DVD from HD source material. It sounds like you've read some of the original posts, but here is probably the best entry point to the lengthy discussions:

Interlaced HD to DVD AGAIN - some test renders

It was started by Nick Hope, but he does a nice job of referencing earlier threads.

I was one of the participants in those discussions, and the key thing you need to note is that all of this involved HD [I]interlaced[/I] material. If you start with progressive (24p HD --> 24p DVD with the pulldown flag set; or 60p HD --> 29.97 interlaced DVD), then you'll probably be happy with the result. Most of the problems uncovered seemed to suggest that Vegas does a lousy job handling the resizing of interlaced material. This resizing is done prior to encoding and therefore affects any workflow that ends up going to lower resolution, regardless of what codec is used at the end of the process.

P.S. to last post: the MP4 encoding in Vegas is, IMHO, second-rate, especially at lower bitrates. So that is a separate issue.

As for the MPEG-2 encoding, I have never seen any hard evidence, based on testing, to show that it is significantly inferior to any other readily available MPEG-2 encoder, including TMPGEnc, which I've use, liked, but ultimately abandoned because I didn't think the results showed any improvement over Vegas.

I am always open to good, well-done tests, and would readily abandon my long-term HD to DVD workflow if I thought I could get better results.

Johnmeyer, Before I dive into that massively long thread, your statement about HD interlaced material brought up a question for me. My camera is a Canon XA10. The camcorder has a few frame rate options, the one that makes the most sense to me would be:

"PF30: Shooting at 30 frames per second, progressive*. Use this frame rate to easily edit your recordings, for example, to post them on the web"

However, in the footnote to the *, it says, " * Recorded as 60i"

As a starting point, if I use that PF30 mode, would my footage be progressive as recommended for going from HD to DVD? Thanks!

MikeLV - one of the things I note is you kind of hit on issues all over the place... one of them was the MP4 -Mpeg2 thing which is really not apples for apples.

You started this thread with a request to workflow for DVD, now your latest post says your camera shoots pseudo Progressive and you want to go to the web??

Keep in mind, if you are trying to maximize output to both DVD and web, that effort calls for different strategies if you must. otherwise set your camer for 60i , shoot, edit, and deliver as it is, a compromise of all things.

videoITguy, I know MP4 and MPEG2 are not apples with apples. I'm just drawing on previous discussions I've read on this forum that established that Vegas does not do a good job of resizing video and that is why the Handbrake tutorial was researched and presented to the public.

The person that responded to me stated: "If you start with progressive (24p HD --> 24p DVD with the pulldown flag set; or 60p HD --> 29.97 interlaced DVD), then you'll probably be happy with the result.

I may not know the exact workflow from HD to DVD just yet, but the fact that he brought up that I SHOULD start with progressive footage led me to the question about the statement in my camera's owners manual about 30 frames per second progressive, but then the footnote says recorded as 60i. So my question is, is the footage progressive or interlaced, and why do they make it so confusing with such a footnote?

lots of tech is confusing - CANON as a manufacturer specifies their equipment to shoot 30PF or 24PF not 30P or 24P - it is called pseudo progressive - canon's lingo is Progressive Frame. It is 60i flagged to look like 30P but it is not 30 progressive- you see a little twist there. makes all the difference in the world. skip shooting 30PF as it has no signifigant advantage to your web delivery or even working in post.

So when john said to start with progressive HD footage, I am unable to do that because my camcorder only shoots pseudo progressive, correct? This leads me to believe that I will be encountering whatever problems were discussed in that long thread he linked to...

YOU are going to shoot 60i with your camera.

MikeLV:

I work on a scuba liveaboard as the videographer. Each week I shoot video of our guests and the diving and offer a video for sale. I've always offered a DVD in NTSC and PAL. Starting this year I also started offering a Blu-ray in NTSC.

I use VASST's Ultimate S Pro to batch render the video and audio from my Vegas project to Blu-ray NTSC, DVD NTSC, and DVD PAL. You can have Ultimate S Pro give each file a unique name. In my case I have three projects set-up in DVD-A set-up that link to my batch renders so when I'm done at the end of the week I have all my stuff rendered in the proper format and I can author my disks very quickly.

One thing I did when I set-up my DVD-A projects is read the video and audio specifications for Blu-ray and DVD (you can find this in the DVD-A Help screens). In my case I have a Sony CX760v camera. I shoot in a format that is compatible for my Blu-ray with the minimum amount of wrangling and I let the Vegas wrangle the footage for the NTSC and PAL DVDs. I realize there are some methods that give better results for DVD and I used those methods in prior years when I offered only DVD. I use the batch render in Vegas now because I can set it up and walk away. My Blu-ray sales are greater than my DVD sales so for me it's a good trade off on time versus quality.

Anyway, my point is that if you want to make a Blu-ray and DVD, be sure to check the video and audio specs for those formats first and then see if you can conform your shooting and your Vegas project properties to get the best compliant results. Maybe you have already done that and I missed it -- sorry if that is the case.

Good luck and be sure to buy some BD-RW and DVD-RW so you can experiment without burning coasters. I

Regards,

Kimberly

Hi Kimberly, thank you for your thoughtful reply and insight into your workflow. Based on my research into Blu-Ray, I learned that throughout the world, DVD is still the large majority of players that people own. Therefore, I will stick to DVD only. I expect the bulk of the sales to be downloadable content, i.e. when the customer buys, they have the option of buying and downloading the video, most likely in an MP4 format, OR they can buy and receive a tangible DVD that will be shipped to them. I'm aware that there are programs, many that are free such as https://sites.google.com/site/avstodvdmain/ that will take nearly any video file(s) and make a DVD that will play in any DVD player. However, since my content is commercial in nature, I want to ensure that the downloadable version looks great, and I'll accomplish that via the Handbrake workflow. Simultaneously, I also want to ensure that my resultant DVD of the same video looks nearly as great. Having knowledge that Vegas performs poorly in resizing video for MP4 encodes, I did not know if the same rang true when encoding from AVC HD to DVD SD compliant video. Based on what you said, it doesn't seem that the same loss of quality when resizing to DVD video occurs?

Based on what you said, it doesn't seem that the same loss of quality when resizing to DVD video occurs?

For my content, I think frameserving my HD material from Vegas to VirtualDub and letting VirtualDub do the resize/downsize/whatever and back to Vegas for a compliant DVD render gives superior results to letting Vegas to it all for you.

I did the frameserve VirtualDub thing the last couple of years with really nice results. I am doing Vegas only now due to time and in my case my BD sales are stronger than my DVD sales.

There are many posts about the frameserve to VirtualDub approach but if you need help looking into that, I can find the old links for you. The tools are all free. It seems daunting at first but it is quite easy once you roll through it a few times.

Regards,

Kimberly

I just put a reply in one of those old threads offering to pay someone to make a step by step tutorial as the technical bits are miles over my head. I've never used DVDA, only Encore, so perhaps I need to learn that program as well now..

MikeLV,

Before you spend too much time chasing a better workflow, you should see how well you can do making DVDs from HD using just Vegas, and nothing else. Do these three things when rendering from HD interlaced to MPEG-2 DVD interlaced, and see if you like the results.

1. Make sure you set a Deinterlace Method in the project properties. Set it to Blend if you have nothing but talking heads; set it to Interpolate if you have lots of fast moving motion. Don't spend a lot of time worrying about this, but just make sure that it is NOT set to None.

2. Set the project and rendering quality to Best. This uses a different resizing algorithm, one that delivers better quality when downsizing HD to SD. This is not a huge deal that is going to make a night/day difference, but it is worth doing.

3. Render to MPEG-2 using upper field first when your source material is HD (which is almost always upper field first). In theory this should not matter at all, but someone in this forum discovered that Vegas degraded quality when the field order was switched during rendering. I did some tests and confirmed that this was true. I don't know if this ever got fixed in later versions of Vegas, but I suspect it did not because very little has been done to the MPEG-2 (DVD) rendering in the last few versions.

This last one makes a surprisingly big difference, and may explain why some people many years ago were getting such disappointing results when downconverting and then rendering their HD video to SD MPEG-2 for DVD.

So use lower field first when rendering MPEG-2 from SD material, and use upper field first when rendering from HD source material.

Some people add sharpening, with the settings set to zero (which still actually does some sharpening). At one time I thought this was a good idea, but I no longer recommend it.

Finally, you should always start with the DVD Architect Widescreen template (NTSC or PAL, depending on where you live in the world). Then, make sure that the various quality settings are set to maximum quality. Do no alter the min or max bitrate, but set the average bitrate to the highest number that will let your material fit (use a bitrate calculator). If the total length of your material is under 75 minutes, you can use 8,000,000 bps VBR (don't go higher than this). I am not a fan of CBR. If the average bitrate needed is below 6,500,000 bps, then you definitely need to use 2-pas VBR.

If you are not satisfied with the results you get from this, then you can take the plunge into the advanced ways of resizing video prior to encoding to MPEG-2. The usual way to do this is to install the Debugmode frameserver (free) and then use that to frameserve into an AVISynth script. You open this in VirtualDub and render your video from there. Nick Hope and I (and John Cline and others) posted several alternative scripts that do a better job with the resizing than does Vegas, preserving more detail. If you decide you want to do this, and if you don't want to read 200+ posts, just let me know and I'll post the simplest script that will give you better results than Vegas.

Finally, let me try to clear up a few other points of confusion you have expressed.

First, you can definitely put 30p video into 60i (usually called 29.97 interlaced) video container. 30p is just 60i video with no time difference between the even and odd fields.\One last thing. The reason for looking for solutions outside of Vegas has little to do with what resizing algorithm Vegas uses. I know there have been lots of discussions and arguments about this, both in this forum and also over at the doom9.org forums. However, most people are not going to notice much difference between all the difference resizing algorithms.

Instead, the real problem everyone was trying to wrangle in those tortuously long posts linked to at the beginning of this thread, is the issue of how to temporarily align. in time, the odd and the even fields in an interlaced video. The worst thing to do (which Vegas does not do unless you make the mistake of setting Deinterlace Method to None) is to resize the whole frame, using both the odd and even fields. The reason for this -- and this leads to an understanding of the underlying problem everyone is trying to solve -- is that those fields are from different points in time. If the motion is fast enough, then when you do the resizing, you end up combining pixels from what amounts to two almost unrelated images, and the result is an absolute, unwatchable mess.

The simple solution is to resize the odd fields (they all come from the same point in time) and then separately resize the even fields, and then combine the two resized fields back together. The problem with this approach is that you are throwing away half the spatial information, and you end up losing a lot of fine detail, like the detail you might find in the fabric on a shirt.

The "solution" is to create a really, really smart algorithm that can take the even fields, which happened 1/30 of a second apart, and "estimate" where each pixel in those fields would be at the point halfway between those two moments in time. If done perfectly, each resulting even field would now be at the same moment in time as the matching odd field, and the two could be taken together and resized to a lower resolution, and that result separated back into individual fields. You could also keep the result as a 60p video, but the DVD specification doesn't permit 60p video.

Vegas most definitely does not contain any of this technology, despite my private emails to the development team many, many years ago urging them to invest in "motion estimation" technology which is at the heart of the solution not only to this problem, but also many encoding issue, elegant slow motion, frame rate changes (such as PAL <--> NTSC), and more.

The other thing to note is that the resizing algorithm is not that big a deal and is not the reason why Vegas can't produce the "ultimate" quality from HD interlaced material. There are dozens - perhaps hundreds -- of posts in this forum and also over at doom9.org where people argue about the "best" resizing algorithm. There are differences, to be sure, but they are minor compared to the issue of how to handle resizing even and odd fields that are both spatially and temporaly different (i.e., at different points in time).

Anyway, my point is that if you want to make a Blu-ray and DVD, be sure to check the video and audio specs for those formats first and then see if you can conform your shooting and your Vegas project properties to get the best compliant results.

Kimberly, what shooting format have you found to work best for targeting both Blu-ray and DVD?

/jerry

"what shooting format have you found to work best for targeting both Blu-ray and DVD?"

HDV 60i 1440x1080 - SD Widescreen 16:9 and HDV Blu-ray spec.

john, thank you, I will give your steps a try when the time comes! I noticed that the last post suggested using 1440x1080 resolution. My camcorder supports that resolution too. I never knew what is was for since full HD is 1920x1080. Should I just stick to the highest resolution and use the 60i frame rate mode?

Kimberly, what shooting format have you found to work best for targeting both Blu-ray and DVD?

I've been doing 24p (23.97) since I got the CX760v. This is one of the compliant formats in DVD-A for BD and NTSC DVD. My camera can also do 60i which is a complaint format, as well as 60p, which is not.

The 24p looks nice to me and the wrecks, fish, and soft coral don't seem to mind : ) It also works well in low light, which helps inside the wrecks at the outer range of my lights.

Regards,

Kimberly

johnmeyer said, "The simple solution is to resize the odd fields (they all come from the same point in time) and then separately resize the even fields, and then combine the two resized fields back together."

The simple solution for me was/is to stop shooting interlaced videos and shoot progressive only. Because of my camera specs I shoot 60p. 24p is garbage so I do not use it!

I do all my rendering in Vegas. I use Sony AVC with a bit rate of 5,000 kbps for mp4 and for DVD's I use the best quality DVD Architect Widescreen template NTSC with the average bit rate depending on how long the video is.

---------
Notes: Before Vegas 12, Sony AVC was not a good choice to use for mp4. It was just as bad as MC. So even with progressive videos I unfortunately needed to use an intermediate and HandBrake. With the Vegas 12 version of Sony AVC I thankfully no longer need that work-flow for mp4.

When I did use interlaced I always used interpolate even with videos with little motion because the sharpness was much better that way. Maybe it is my videos or whatever but that is the way it always worked best for me. One should experiment and find what works best for them. And I have spent many hours praying, researching and experimenting to find what works best for me!!!
---------

So all of these discussions on intermediates are thankfully a moot point for me. And the time I save by not having to do all of that extra work is so helpful and it saves money on my light bill!

I am taking a very short break on video work so I will have very little time here for a while.

I hope this helps.

[I]john, thank you, I will give your steps a try when the time comes! I noticed that the last post suggested using 1440x1080 resolution. My camcorder supports that resolution too. I never knew what is was for since full HD is 1920x1080. Should I just stick to the highest resolution and use the 60i frame rate mode?[/I]Short answer: yes.

Unless you have a specific workflow that requires lower resolution, why throw away quality before you ever get started? Shooting in high resolution gives you so many more options in post (like zooming in order to frame shots, etc.).

As for interlaced vs. progressive, many people come away from these discussions thinking that progressive is "better" than interlaced. This is not exactly true because interlaced video looks absolutely great when viewed on the TV set. What IS true is that certain post production operations are more complicated when done with interlaced video, and if not done correctly, can lead to bad results.

Finally, frame rate has nothing whatsoever to do with "better" or "worse" and has everything to do with aesthetic choice. 24p gives the video a "once removed" feel which is great for imparting a feeling that something was done a long time ago. You'll notice that during sporting events, when they go to commercial, they often show highlight clips in 24p instead of 60i in order to emphasize that these are clips from a few minutes ago.

It is fascinating to me that, when video cameras first allowed shooting in 24p, many people thought this was going to be "better" because that is the frame rate that Hollywood film cameras have used since the beginning of the sound era. It took a long time for some people to realize that 24p really isn't a very good choice for maintaining a sense of immediacy, and certainly does violence to fast motion. I have had this cadence available to me for a long time and haven't had a reason to use it, but I definitely would if I thought that "look" would be appropriate.

If you can get a camera which shoots 60p (or 50p), it definitely gives you the most flexibility, especially since most of these camera also provide the option to shoot in 60i (50i) or 24p. I generally shoot in 1920x1080 60p and then make changes in post to fit the delivery format required for my project. For DVD (which does not support 60p), I convert to 60i which is a trivial technical operation and produces no artifacts. For Internet delivery, I downsize to 720p and change the frame rate to that somewhat odd format (as I described it in my last post), namely 30p. This is because I have not seen very reliable results with either 1920x1080 (too much starting/stopping on YouTube and Vimeo) or with 60p. Since the conversion from 60p to 30p is also a completely trivial technical step, the conversion from 1920x1080 60p to 1080x720 30p introduces no major visual disturbances, other than the fact that the video now has half the number of frames and fewer pixels.

"Notes: Before Vegas 12, Sony AVC was not a good choice to use for mp4. It was just as bad as MC. So even with progressive videos I unfortunately needed to use an intermediate and HandBrake. With the Vegas 12 version of Sony AVC I thankfully no longer need that work-flow for mp4."

In this statement, you're referring to higher bitrate MP4 though, correct? If my goal is best quality at lower bitrates, then Handbrake is still the way to go, yes?

So I think what I will do is shoot in 1920x1080 60i (since my camera doesn't offer "true" progressive. I will encode directly from Vegas to MPEG2 widescreen DVD (ensuring that all my settings are on Best, and select Upper Field First) and see how it looks. For the online downloadable video files, I will encode the same video from the timeline to DNxHD, and then encode to MP4 using Handbrake and hopefully that should be all I need for these upcoming projects.

ok Mikelv