First ever render - Settings help needed

Toobad wrote on 1/8/2008, 3:45 AM

Hi, and thanks for stopping to read this. My journey started over a year ago when my wife announced she wanted to visit the Galapagos Islands. I rushed out and bought a Canon HV10 camcorder and during our trip I shot 5 hours of HDV footage in PAL 25fps . On our return to the UK I built this PC for editing:

Q6600 Quad Core running Vista Home Premium 64-bit
4Gb RAM
3 x 320Gb 7200rpm SATA2 drives each holding Progs, Raw Footage and Finished Video respectively
500Gb Backup drive via e-SATA
640Mb 8800GTS graphics card
30" LCD moitor at 2560 x 1600 native resolution

Although a complete n00b, I loaded and learnt VMS PE 8.0c and am nearly finished my 40-minute masterpiece having conquered Titling, FX, Transitions, Voiceover, Music etc. Unfortunately my head is now full of so much technical info that my learning curve is virtually vertical and I just cannot face studying "Rendering" Initially, all I want to do is create the HIGHEST quality rendered movie on my Finished Video hard drive for watching in a 1440 x 1080 window on my monitor. File size is not an issue and I don't care how long the render takes (I assume minimum or no compression yields the best quality). My project consists of .m2t Vegas-captured footage, .wav voiceover, .mp3 music and .jpg photos. Is putting everything in a .avi container the way to go? I think the PC has sufficient grunt for the task as I seem to be able to preview unrendered footage direct from the timeline at the Best (Full) setting with little or no stuttering.

My project properties were set using:

Custom Template (1440 x 1080, 25fps)
Field order: None (progressive scan)
Pixel aspect ratio: 1.3333 (HDV 1080)
Full-resolution rendering quality: Best
Deinterlace method: Interploate fields
Audio: 16-bit 48KHz Stereo

I'd really appreciate any optimised settings suggestions from experienced users so I get this right first time when I use the Make Movie wizard. Later I will want to re-render for printing back to the camcorder and eventually re-render again to create DVDs but I'll keep those cans of worms firmly closed for today.

Trevor

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 1/8/2008, 12:50 PM

If you want it to just "watch it on your PC", export as mpeg2 .m2t at the native HD resolution, using the Main Concept mpeg2 type. Windows Media Player or VLC should be able to playback the .m2t file.

If you want to export for something like Vimeo.com export in 720p HD, or at 1mbps for Youtube, both using WMV.

If you want to *archive* for future usage, export in Cineform .avi.

Toobad wrote on 1/9/2008, 4:48 AM

Thanks Eugenia, and thanks in general for devoting so much time to this forum. A little handholding really does improve confidence. I've written the settings in my VMS Quick Start manual.

Well, the Main Concept codec created a 7.22Gb file with a .m2t extension. WMP v.11 which comes with Vista didn't know what it was and nor did VLAN. I renamed the file with a .mpg extension and WMP, although happy to read other .mpg files on my drives, told me it didn't suppport the codec used to compress the file. VLAN was much more accomodating and treated me to 40 minutes of HDV goodness of such quality it was almost a religious experience! If anybody has come across a solution to get WMP v.11 to play nice with Main Concept codecs and indeed .m2t files, I would love to hear about it.

Incidentally, I also did a 4-second test "archive" render in .avi using Cineform HD. I only get audio from both WMP and VLAN yet the file size seems to indicate the video is in there too. If I render as "uncompressed .avi I get audio and video.

It was nice to see all 4 cores of the Q6600 each sweating away at around 85%. The 40 minutes of footage took 87 minutes to render at stock CPU speed and 1996Mb of RAM was in use during this frenzy of activity.

Trevor

Kennymusicman wrote on 1/9/2008, 5:29 AM

My WMP11 plays .m2t just fine. WMP just does not recognise the format first time around - but just choose to open it in media player and it may work for you (leaving m2t extension). THen again, I do also have k-lite installed. BUt it does work on my WMP, so there is definitely potential for you

Toobad wrote on 1/9/2008, 8:45 AM

Thanks Kenny, I grabbed the k-lite "mega" codec pack. I ran the default installation which first removed all duplicated standalone codecs from my system and now I have a full set in one location which makes things very tidy. WMP11 now understands .m2t files but only on the video side, still no audio but at least I feel I'm still slowly climbing up the slope. On the upside the bundled Classic Media Player plays my "masterpeice" as well as VLAN.

Trevor.

Kennymusicman wrote on 1/9/2008, 10:33 AM

A few people will be very much against k-lite and having more codecs than you need etc. But I have found it to be very good for me. I install it with "lots of stuff" setting, and configure the final screen to my taste.

It sorted out a long-time crashing in file explorer too - my indeo codec was corrupt but didn't know it (used by windows as a preview filter on some thumbnails)

As for audio - m2t comes with an ac3 5.1, and a simultaneous stereo downmix stream - it'll be a filter you need to configure in media player - look in option under dvd/advanced - it's somewhere around there. That's the reason why I configure the last screen on klite - I specifiy my audio to work MY way. :)

Toobad wrote on 1/9/2008, 2:01 PM

Sorry Kenny but I'm out of my depth now. I looked at WMP11 under Tools, Options, DVD tab, Advanced without any luck. When you say filter do you mean codec? I get a long list of codecs under the ffdshow tab but AC3 does not appear, indeed everything seems to be video related. Is there an audio section which I'm not finding?

Trevor.

Kennymusicman wrote on 1/9/2008, 2:49 PM

you can access the conifg app from
\program files\jlite codec pack\filters\ac3config.exe

In the system tab, I have AC3, DTS and DVD selected.
'Prefer AC3Filter' , and 'Use Drect Sound by Default;

In mixer & gains tab, all my faders are central (I think by default it may boost centre channel unless you change this on the last installation screen)

Hope that helps you a bit. If you are not sure - you can always download an updated version of k-lite (they're updated about every week) and reinstall, with other settings to your hearts content. I'm finding it to be pretty good with cleaning itself up and not leaving cack all over my system.!

Toobad wrote on 1/10/2008, 8:13 AM

Mmmmm, that's the settings I have. I've got AV in VLAN and Classic Media Player but just can't get audio into WMP11. Of course I may be complicating things by outputting via fibre optic SPDIF to a Yamaha sound projector. I'll wait until the next k-lite release and re-install "the works" this time paying far more attention to what I'm doing. In the meantime I will learn about codecs in general and Main Concept and Cineform compressors in particular. Thanks for all your efforts, Kenny.

Trevor.