"You must be using the main concept encoder since the sony avc encoder doesn't have 2 pass vbr"

Indeed, I'm a bit gunshy of the Sony one based on past issues.
Tried rendering 1 minute at 20M, good , it plays in VLC without the munged first GOP. It load onto the V9 T/L and plays as smooth as the QT one. It looks a tad softer than the MC encode though. This could be a good thing because that has also killed the aliasing I was getting from the MC encode.

Now all I need to do is tweak the de-interlacer a bit to see if I can get rid of the dog teeth.

Bob.

35 minutes into the New Year down here. Got off to a good start now that I have the de-interlacer working properly. Didn't help having the project properties set to Upper Field First.

In the midst of that I tried using Field and Frame Differencing. Oooh, not good, not on fast pans from a camera using CMOS chips and probably a fast shutter speed, no sir.

I'm going to have to do too things:

1) Print out an A3 copy of the video signal processing path, laminate it and hang it up next to my desk.

2) Develop a check list, kind of like NASA has for a launch.

Happy New Year everyone. May your fields be in the right order in 2010.

Bob.

I discovered that a slight Gaussian blur can tend to eliminate aliasing and interlace patterns at render because it muddles the sharp edges. Of course, a little goes a long way.

Oh yes, that's been my stock in trade since V4. You generally only need it in the vertical direction if it's line twitter, maybe just the smallest amount in the horizontal to counter aliasing.

In this case though it was the real deal, pure aliasing causing color fringing on the fine sharp edges and of course it danced around as the camera moved. The worry here is this footage after I deliver it to the client may go through another round of scaling and encoding.

Bob.

Is your project in Vegas 8 or 9? If it's in 8, you can use DebugMode Frameserver with Avisynth and Megui to get it encoded in h.264. While it's slow, it looks excellent. Unfortunately, DMFS doesn't work in Vegas 9, even though it claims to.

Project is in V9.0c.
I could encode it to a DI and from that use something other than Vegas to do the encode. I've also got to figure out how to get this in a Quicktime wrapper.

There's a bigger issue afoot here, Why was Vegas bought to its knees by a valid AVCHD stream. VLC can decode it and play it, wrapped into Flash and streamed out of YouTube the same encoding plays just fine. Two (or more) pass VBR is nothing new, it's the best but slowest way to wrestle the best quality video into a given file size / bandwidth. Why does the SCS developed encoder deny us the option to use VBR, is it simply to hide the problems Vegas has handling the datastream.
I failed to mention something else interesting previously. When I could get the MC encoded data stream onto the T/L it displayed a red frame as the last thumbnail.

Bob.

Why does the SCS developed encoder deny us the option to use VBR, is it simply to hide the problems Vegas has handling the datastream.

I don't know why, but they have to revamp that encoder completely. h.264 is a great codec, and it allows to put decent quality HD on DVD media, while you cannot do the same with MPEG-2. Sure, for paid jobs buying a $7 BD-R isn't a big deal, but I can't spend $100 in a spindle of just a few BD-Rs like I spend $20 for a spindle of several DVD-Rs like I normally do. And there's no way I'm going to author my HD footage to DVD-Video because it looks horrible on a HDTV set.

These days I started playing around with Edius Neo 2 Booster, which not only is far better than Vegas at handling AVCHD, but also it provides an excellent h.264 encoder with far more options than Vegas' handicapped one. SCS should take a long hard look at Neo 2 Booster because even if it's a prosumer NLE at half the price of Vegas, in many aspects is much better.

I've also got to figure out how to get this in a Quicktime wrapper.
Change the file extension from .mp4 to .mov if you wish. QT handles either, and in the case of h.264, there seems to be no fundamental difference.
The x264 encoder in Handbrake works 25% faster than MC, has world-class decomb/detelicine filters, and more tweakable options than anyone could use.
CoreAVC decoder has been mentioned as the fastest playback tool, but I have no idea how it works with various players.

Thanks guys and thanks for reminding mw about Handrake.
I'd downloaded the latest release and never installed it. Might take it for a spin, I'll have to see if I can get it, V9.0c and the frameserver to play nicely.

Bob.

Alas, HandBrake won't play with Frameserver. It's because of a bunch of prescanning HB does to save one the complexitities of optimizing the render using the CLI (although that's there too).

That being said, the same x264 codec is available in AviSynth through MeGUI. A lot of HandBrake's proprietary stuff, including the advanced decomb/detelicine, and the one-pass CQ option (which I can attest is fast and every bit as good as 2-pass VBR), is not, however.

If you can imagine wiping the sink with your right hand, and cleaning the mirror with your left I think this is pretty much what Vegas seems to do between the timeline and preview.

I think it's the Achilles heal.

VLC only has to spool it out.

Just an observation.

Why are you spending so much for BD-R? I am paying about $2.60 each.

Why are you spending so much for BD-R? I am paying about $2.60 each.

Which brand, what's the quantity you buy and what is the store?

I don't buy in huge quantities, the largest I bought was a spindle of Memorex (15) and that made me hate that brand forever because four months after burning them, the information was gone, just like a crappy diskette from the 80s. I had bought them because for years I used Memorex DVD media with no problems, and they were $5.28 a piece when purchased in that pk of 15, but that made me lose all confidence in that brand, and they offered me to send me a replacement, to which I told them to stick it where the sun doesn't shine, because I wasn't going to trust my footage to that low quality brand again knowing that most likely I would lose it in four months.

So from reading forums on optical media I gathered that the best brand seems to be Verbatim these days, so that's what I've been buying, and so far no problems. They're around $5 plus shipping, so they end up being around $7.

"I don't buy in huge quantities, the largest I bought was a spindle of Memorex (15) and that made me hate that brand forever because four months after burning them, the information was gone, just like a crappy diskette from the 80s. I had bought them because for years I used Memorex DVD media with no problems,"

How do you know they were Memorex discs? The label?

Get Dvd Identifier http://dvd.identifier.cdfreaks.com/ and look at who really made them.

How do you know they were Memorex discs? The label?

Good software. According to it, they are Ritek, which doesn't surprise me, since I had read many times that they're total crap. Of course I could not care less if they are a different brand than what it's printed on the label, to me the company on the label is responsible for everything they sell, if they sell me crap, I will not buy it ever again.

The Verbatim ones are made by Mitsubishi BTW, according to DVD Id.

One unanticipated problem.
OSX would not let my client even find the mp4 files I copied onto his HFS disk. I'm certain there's a way one can setup OSX's finder/chooser thing to show every file and folder on a drive but trying to explain that over the phone was futile.
So I've renamed the files to "mov" and copied them into the root of his drive AND burnt them onto a DVD. I also installed the latest QT Player from Apple onto the office PC and it will play the files.

Bob.