Comments

rmack350 wrote on 9/7/2006, 4:55 PM
Its in the manual somewhere. Best does bicubic interpolation, which come into play when you resize thnings via pan/crop or track motion. It's a big improvement in that case, but otherwise it does nothing.

Try a few test renders on a transition and compare the render times with the results. I'm not sure how it compares but my hope is that Best only has to do interpolation when needed and so your times should be the same.

Best can be a lot slower than good when it's needed.

Rob Mack
rs170a wrote on 9/7/2006, 6:12 PM
Rob is correct.
Sony's official response (Answer ID 334) is as follows:

"Best" uses bicubic scaling with integration, while "Good" uses bilinear without integration. You will have a hard time telling the difference, but must use "Best" if you are using high resolution stills or video that are getting scaled down to the final output size. "Good" may have bad artifacts on the near-horizontal edges, while "Best" will look great.
More can be read on this subject in the Creative Cow forums here.

Mike
Laurence wrote on 9/7/2006, 8:59 PM
how much speed difference is there?
rmack350 wrote on 9/7/2006, 9:28 PM
Worth testing. I don't know if anyone has ever done it.

Rob Mack
mbryant wrote on 9/8/2006, 1:55 AM
I've been using best when creating SD mpeg from HDV source - as that involves rescaling.

My experience doing this is that best takes about 40% longer. E.g. on a 1.6 Pentium M laptop, rendering 1 minute of HDV to SD mpeg takes 7 minutes on good, and 10 minutes on best.

The amount of difference may vary depending on what you are doing... so this isn't a complete test, just what I've seen.
technobaba wrote on 9/8/2006, 3:02 AM
Thanks for the info. The manual used your words but explained nothing. I assume bicubic interpolation means the Photoshop like conversion when you change the size of a picture, i.e. how to collapse lines of pixels to fewer lines (or the reverse).
If no resize, then GOOD = BEST. Right? No other differences.
i.e. What does INTEGRATION mean?

I assume bilinear means take the average of two pixels.
Bicubic is a cube root of two pixels? Three lines sum of cubes? ANyone know?

SPEED:
I did a test for my stuff which requires letterboxing some DV shot in widescreen and being converted to 4:3. This is a lot of resizing. Plus a letterbox mask and color correction.
BEST is slow! about 1.5 to 2 frames per second on my 2.6 ghz pentium.
Good is maybe 5 frames per second. i.e. 2 or 3 times faster.

DEINTERLACE: When does it matter?
I got the rules but when is deinterlace done? For fades? Efx? Size changes? All above?
rmack350 wrote on 9/8/2006, 8:52 AM
I think "Integration" should read "Interpolation".

What I'm curious about (and think i know the answer to) is what happens at "Best" when there's rendering to do without resizing. Does "Best" affect render times even when it isn't needed? To put it another way, how smart is Vegas about this.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicubic_interpolation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_interpolation

Rob Mack
Jayster wrote on 9/8/2006, 9:11 AM
Interpolation is "guessing" the value of a function at unknown data points (which happens when you resize an image). The "guessing" is usually done with mathematical algorithms.

Integration is a mathematical operation (using calculus). So I think that Sony meant what they said in their statement, since both algorithms are doing some sort of interpolation.