excuse my ignorance - what is CCE?

Cliff Etzel
bluprojekt

http://www.visiblelight.com/mall/productview.aspx?pid=7

The full CCE seems to be about as good as it gets.

Bob.

Coursedesign, I don't think I've ever compared progressive MPEG2 files between CCE Basic and Procoder 2. I might have a try at that. When I compared them I was comparing interlaced DVDs on my TVs.

Cliff, CCE is one of my favourite ever programs because not only is the quality of the output fantastic, it's just so fast and stable. Rendering speed is very important for the short-run souvenir DVDs we make. And it's cheap.

CCE Basic version already has more settings than I need. The full (and extremely expensive) version would be a liability in my hands.

If this tempts anyone to check out CCE Basic then there is one very important default setting that I have to change to stop the footage looking washed out:

Advanced video setting > Luminance 0 to 255, not 16 to 235

Nick -

I'm curious about your workflow.

Do you prerender a completed HD AVI intermediate?

Or are you somehow able to render directly off the Vegas timeline?

A lot of the work we are doing here is directly from the ingested M2t footage. If we could somehow render directly off of the Vegas timeline, the additional speed and quality you speak of would be great. If we have to prerender to an HD intermediate, I don't see any time saved.

Would you clear the workflow up for me, please?
v

CCE Basic won't accept anything above standard definition, so I just use it for compressing to MPEG2, not resizing.

The key to the workflow is that Debugmode Frameserver will output at whatever the current Vegas project settings are. So Vegas does the deinterlacing and resizing.

So this is what I do...

1. Put the HDV on the timeline, in my case .m2t files but Cineform AVIs would be fine too.

2. Set the following Vegas project properties (saved as a custom template). Note I'm in the PAL world:

width: 720
height: 576
Frame rate: 25fps
Field order: none (progressive scan)
Pixel aspect ratio: 1.4222 (to give no pillarboxing. It looks like you can't change this value from the pulldown list but you can just type in the box and it will be remembered)
Quality: Best
Motion Blur: Gaussian
Deinterlace: Blend Fields

3. Frameserve to a file I call framserver.avi using the Debugmode Frameserver. I choose RGB24 and check "write audio as PCM samples in signpost AVI", which is what I've always done in my old SD workflow. Debugmode Framserver appears in the "Render As > Save as type" box after it's installed.

4. Open frameserver.avi in CCE Basic, choose the appropriate settings, and encode. CCE will even do a 2-pass VBR from the frameserved file.

On my Xp x64 machine with 4GB RAM I have "dynamic RAM preview" set to 128MB. Below 16MB or above 256Mb the rendering process is slower. On my P4 3.0C machine with 2GB RAM I have it at 64MB.

I may experiment with interlaced rather than progressive again but it seems daft to put interlacing back into footage that has been deinterlaced.

Edit: By the way that workflow applies to test 1 in my initial post. Test 2 was done from a standard definition DV widescreen file that I had rendered in advance from the original HDV file.

I'm curious as to why you're de-interlacing 50i?
As far as I can determine there's no advantage, almost no display device will treat it as such, including LCD and Plasma TVs.
However if you really want 25p then I suspect doing the de-interlace using Blend in HD prior to the downscale would give a better result. I'm assuming that in your workflow Vegas downscales to SD and de-interlaces that.

Bob.

Bob in the above workflow I don't know exactly what Vegas is doing.

A resize from 1080i to 576i sounds pretty messy to me and I was guessing that internally Vegas would probably de-interlace then resize then re-interlace. Which is why it seemed a bit silly to target interlaced 576 as so few displays would benefit from it.

To be honest my understanding of progressive v interlaced and their relationship to different types of display is not good. Do you think I should just carry on producing interlaced DVDs even from an HDV source?

I think just stick to producing 50i. Your footage seems to contain plenty of fast motion and doesn't need a 'filmic' look anyway.

SD DVD doesn't support 25p so you gain nothing there from what I know. Plus TVs do a pretty good job of de-interlacing as well, in fact they'll even try to de-interlace the 25PsF that your DVDs would contain.

All you need do is not set your project properties to progressive.
For web stuff de-interlacing the DV25 PAL might be good but I've done it using Mike Crash's Smart De-interlacer and I'm pretty happy with the results so far.
Bob.

Thanks Bob, I'll stick with interlaced for DVDs.

I've been using Smart Deinterlacer VirtualDub plugin for web stuff and it works well. I'm choosing the "Edge-directed interpolate" option recently instead of "blend".

[I]SD DVD doesn't support 25p[/I]

All NTSC movie DVDs we buy or rent in the U.S. support 24p progressive (with pulldown).

I didn't know that PAL DVDs don't have a way to support 25p.

What is the format on the discs then for source material that is inherently progressive, like film?

Edit: NTSC DVDs allow progressive footage to be losslessly restored from the interlaced pulldown format that was created to support TVs from the interlaced era.

I'm just surprised if the PAL DVD format didn't allow for lossless restoral of the progressive frames.