Amazed, Dazed and dissapointed!

AZEdit wrote on 7/15/2003, 10:39 PM
I have made V4 my main editing program- it's great! My dissapointment comes from encoding MPG2 and final DVD utilizing DVDA. Most of my DVD's have been video programs- and they have looked great...this particular program I just finnished was all high-end animation for a medical trade show. We completed the animation - abouth 3.5 minutes worth- and I received the files from my animators as sequential targa files- standard proceedure. I brought them into V4 and sliced, diced and dissolved into a final show that looked great on the system. I rendered out the MPG 2 for DVDA (the default settings) and authored the finished DVD. It looked pretty good to the average glance- but I noticed some aliasing and noise near some fine lines- and when your animating a stint proceedure- you have fine lines. They looked really bad! I re-rendered the show as standard MPG2 (not DVDA) and tried that- just as bad! I was kinda in a panic with the way it looked - and for the amount we charged- it had to look great on the plasma monitors at the show! I am very dissapointed with the MPG2 codecs in V4 and the final encode from DVDA...I mean I was happy with it when we were doing video- we did not have all the detail right in your face like the animation!! I remembered I still had my Sonic DVDit Pro CD collecting dust in the corner.... this version had the ligos update and I loaded it into my system. I then encoded the show as an uncompressed avi- since Sonic DVDit did not like V4 flavor of DV avi.... I set Sonic to give me the best resolution for avi's and let it encode- it was very fast and guess what- It looked alot better than the DVDA using MPG 2 codecs in Vegas! It was not perfect- but hey it's compressed DVD and it was a major improvement! The file size was about 45 megs larger than the other files.... I don't know what to say :( I'm depressed over this find...but, seeing what I saw with nthe animation- I will continue to let Sonic do the encoding and the final DVD work....

Comments

AZEdit wrote on 7/15/2003, 10:44 PM
I decided to do one more test... I let V4 encode the MPG2 and brought that into Sonic. It had the same result as the lower quality DVD's earlier.... the encoder is not as good as Sonics??
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/15/2003, 11:19 PM
That's wierd. I use the Ligos encoder at work with Premiere 6 and it totally, completly, sucks compared to SoFo's. You said that fine lines were causing problems? I'll give it a wirl on my comp and see what happens.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/15/2003, 11:26 PM
I just rendered some lines of various thickness and directions in both Vegas and TMPGenc (via frameserving) and they looked identical. Couldd you setup part of your rendered mpeg for download?
AZEdit wrote on 7/15/2003, 11:35 PM
Friar- whats weird is I just imported the VOB files into Vegas to cut and paste the samples for you...they look very close in V4 - but when played on my WIN DVD 4 player and my Sony and Toshiba Table top DVD's- there is a noticeable difference!
I'm getting confused here! lolol
Chienworks wrote on 7/16/2003, 7:16 AM
I'd be suspicious of the change of material. DV and MPEG are both optimized for more natural images such as real life scenes and skin tones. These types of images don't contain many sharp edges or strong color contrasts. It's quite possible that your animated material contains lots of both. These will cause problems when compressed.

I would think it likely that there are MPEG compressors out there designed specifically for this sort of material. Anybody ever heard of them? I wouldn't really even know where to start looking. Perhaps there are some advanced MainConcept tweaks that could be applied to optimize it for animation.
JJKizak wrote on 7/16/2003, 7:40 AM
In the small amount of experimentation that I have done, I have determined that
a lot of the problems rests with the sofo DV codec. Try going directly into DVDA with
the captured DV AVI file before you place it on the timeline. The mpeg2 codec
then works perfectly. Well for me anyway. Remember that the sofo D V codec is not
utilized until it is on the timeline and effects are placed.
mikkie wrote on 7/16/2003, 1:26 PM
" I rendered out the MPG 2 for DVDA (the default settings) and authored the finished DVD. ... I re-rendered the show as standard MPG2 (not DVDA) and tried that- just as bad! ... The file size was about 45 megs larger than the other files"

There actually isn't a std setting for mpg2 - just whatever templates one might use. As the Ligos encoded files are larger, probably less compression applied, so at the least I'd try encoding to mpg2 upping the bitrate - use cbr or if vbr, watch the minimum.

If going for top quality, might check out the TMPGEnc encoder, which has a more & finer controls, and CCE is popular, though beyond the price/catagory of the Mainconcept plugin. In my own personal experience the biggest difference I've seen with Ligos is perhaps better results at really low bandwidth, but that's about it.
AZEdit wrote on 7/16/2003, 2:34 PM
Thanks for all your feedback- much appreciated!