Spot,

Great Tutorial and it could not be more timely! I have spent all week trying to get a successful recode to Nero Digital of an HDV project in Vegas shot with the FX1. To date I have not been successful with one problem or another (usually aspect ratio) tripping me up. This tutorial gives me a detailed path to follow and so I shall attack the problem again. I just finished printing out the entire tutorial so I can follow along carefully as I try this again.

Thanks so much for posting these excellent tutorials. I look forward to Part II of this one.

Tom

The credit goes to Mark Dileo. He's been one of the VASST Ulead instructors who's written a couple books for VASST in the passt, but we're thrilled that he's recently jumped on the Vegas bandwagon and dived into it headlong. Mark is an experienced editor, and has video in his blood. He's taken on Vegas headlong in the past two months, and you'll be hearing a lot more from him, I think.
Thanks, Mark!
(You also know him as "Hulk" in the forum) FWIW, he's won many triathalons and looks like a miniature version of Lou Ferrigno.

thank you mark and SPOT. cant wait to try this one. waitingfor my FX! camera now

Spot and Mark,

With your tutorial on Framserving printed out and at my side, I took my Vegas HDV project consisiting of Cineform .avi clips and cross-fade transitions and once again attempted to create a Nero Digital HD file out of it. I followed the tutorial to the letter, and this time was more successful than ever before but I am still not quite there.

I now have a Nero Digital file that will play in Nero Showtime 2 at the full frame rate on my Xeon dual 3.6 GHz. And the aspect ratio is the desired 16:9 without forcing that aspect ratio in Showtime 2. However, at every cross-fade trnsition, the video playback freezes on a frame and then jumps to the next scene. In other words none of the cross-fade transitons are seen. Apparently the Debugmode frameserving is not properly serving those to Nero Recode 2.

Spot and/or Mark, do either of you have any suggestions for fixing this problem? If I can lick this one, then I think that I will have a perfectly playable Nero Digital H.264/ACC file to play back. But how do I get the cross-fade transitions to appear in the final Nero HD video?

Tom

I don't do HD, so this idea may be a red herring: Did you try RGB32 instead of RGB24? I know Satish always recommended RGB32.

Johnmeyer,

I can try that, but somehow I don't think that is the explanation for why I am not seeing any of the cross-fades. The Nero HD-video is excellent except I am not seeing a single-cross fade, just a freeze frame followed by a jump from one video clip to the next.

Tom

good guide, thanks - couple of errors , or really things that should be pointed out:

you should frame serve to recode as YUY2 , not RGB

Recode2 HDTV profiles are incomplete at this point - you may notice some issues if you really blow up the image. nero knows of this. A new version of recode just came out yesterday and i have not checked it ... recode2 doesnt have much in the way of settings - certain types of sources may not look very good on it at and others look great-- best results are to NOT use the standard HD settings .

playback of the encoded image is not that great in the nero playback app -- in fact it seems to not playback a number of things very well at all what-so-ever .. so the aspect ratio hack mentioned is not correct nessessarly - HD should be at 1:1 PAR for compatability with different playback types. Which means proper resizing - which means either letting vegas do it or, for the highest possable quality, resize out of vegas and bring it back in ..


Mpeg4 doesnt take that much cpu power really if the right stuff is used ...

You may be able to skip using frame serving anyway with nero --- we are working on that ..



A really good, very in-depth, comparison of mpeg4 codecs and as well, a complete in depth look at encoding with recode2, can be also found @ the doom9 forum ...

there is one other little issue using the debugmode frameserver (well couple small issues - but still best thing since sliced bread)

but you can see it for yourself ...

start a new project - 1080i24 poject settings ..

put the ntsc test color bar pattern on a video track and look at the scopes ... render this out using frame server and load this image into another vegas using same project settings and look at scope in the second vegas - OUCH ...


ok - now do this ... stop frame server in first vegas and load the sharpen filter with a setting of 0.00 , now look at scope --- ok a problem, but render this out using frameserver and load into second vegas and look at scope -- big problem , but also look at the two images- they dont match either, the sharpen filter artifact is gone but the levels are further knocked off ... anyway -- you can try this out with a number of filters and you will soon find that levels/preview window/output/scope dont match up....

Thanks for all of the positive comments guys. This project started out as a very simple "here's how to connect Vegas to Recode" and turned into something much larger. And as always, as the scope increases so do the potential problems.

BH_M –

Thanks for the input. I realize that you are an expert on this matter so I’m hoping you can answer a few questions for me.

I wasn't 100% sure about rendering out RGB24, but since Recode uses YUV colorspace I assumed there would have to be a colorspace conversion, either at Recode's end or at the frameserver. I'm curious as to why converting RGB to YUV at the frameserver is a better option? I asked someone at Nero about this and they thought it would be a wash either way as well, but I don’t think he was an expert on this particular subject.

I couldn't find any info on the digital profiles and Nero told me they are in process of preparing such info. I thought about examining all of the profiles, for a minute, but decided it would have been a Herculean task for me to render out and examine video for every profile! I didn't notice any problems with the HDTV profile in my limited testing but you never know. Thanks for bringing up the point…I’ll be looking for problems now. What do you know about these mysterious digital profiles? There is really no documentation on them. I assumed they just specified maximum resolution for compressed video sources, unless reduced by the resize tab.

Agreed, Showtime 2 is not the MOST efficient playback. It will not playback mt2 files full frame rate on my computer but WMP will. But, for the sake of testing purposes I thought it best to stay with one display application to limit variables. Hopefully Showtime will be further optimized for MPEG-4, it’s a great little app and it does play a wide variety of formats.

As for HD being 1:1, you are correct. But I am referring specifically to HDV 1080i, which is not 1:1 PAR, but 1:1.333. I believe that is the cause of the aspect ratio problem. The 1440 pixels must be scaled to 1920 (or some proportionate ratio to create SAR of 16:9 depending on display size). Anamorphic HDV 1080i is not a square pixel format so it’s causing problems. Forcing the aspect ratio in Showtime forces this scaling to occur. The other choice is down sampling the image a bit as I mention. Since most displays have a res of less than 1440x816 there won't be much decrease in quality so long as the display device will accept this signal. I mentioned the workaround more to explain the problem and for computer desktop use than to "solve" it. The other option is to upscale the image to full 1920x1080, 1:1 PAR, but this would require more bandwidth during compression. I would think the most efficient compression route would be to just compress the anamorphic image at native resolution (1440x1080 PAR 1:1.333) and rescale upon playback.

Doom9 is a great site. He’s be on top of ripping and compressing DVDs for years now. And he pretty much updates on a daily basis…amazing.

Thanks again for the great comments and could you shoot me an e-mail at mdileo@verizon.net? I’m working on Part II and would like to run a few things by you if you don’t’ mind.


Tnw2933-

I just tested a short project with a transition and it worked okay for me. Upon importing the signpost file see if you can scroll to the transition in the import file dialog to see if it’s working there. If it is then the problem is most likely in the playback software.


- Mark

Regarding RGB, YUV and frameserving, you might want to look at this old post from Satish, the frameserver author:

DEBUGMODE FRAMESERVER - set-up options

Mark,

I checked the Nero Digital HD file that I created in Windows Media Player 10 and it played OK in 16:9 aspect ratio and showed the cross-fades perfectly. However, at the end of scene one of this project, I used the iris transiton in Vegas and that causes the playback to begin flashing between black and white and color. Clearly this transition was not playing back correctly in Windows Media Player 10 or Showtime 2 where I see the same flashing chroma behavior. I also noticed that playing back the Nero Digital HD file in WMP10 produced what looked like a string of colored beads along the right side of the 16:9 picture. (I don't see those in Nero Showtime 2. Finally, the audio in WMP10 was totally out of synch with the video.

I am now trying to download the updates posted today to some of the Nero applications, but frankly I don't think Nero Ultra 6 is readey for prime time -- at least not where preparing HD files is concerned.

Tom

johnmeyer -

Thanks for the link but I'm not getting where it says why it's preferred to frameserve from Vegas to Recode using YUV?

As I said, Vegas is RGB, Recode is YUV. A colorspace conversion will have to occur somewhere. If you frameserve RGB then Recode will do the conversion, if you frameserve YUV then the frameserver will do the conversion.

I decided that I would rather trust Recode to do the conversion over the frameserver. Now noting some possible conversion issues brought to light by Brian it appears I may have made the correct choice to not have the frameserver extensively modify the video signal.

I'm not an expert on this conversion. I was making educated decision based on the information available and some quick testing.

- Mark

Mark, based on the mails from yourself and the engineers at Nero, maybe I misunderstood, but I thought you had it right? I guess I'm confused at this point.

To Mark and Spot
Am I to infer from all of this that the tutorial is going to have to be revised and that possibly Recode isn't. as someone said, ready for primetime?
I am very interested in this but for now languish in the old world of my used TV for a monitor - but sometime this year I will have an HD monitor and these issues here will be very relevant to what I will be doing -- thanks for all you efforts - I will follow this closely.............

fultro

After downloading and installing the latest software updates from Nero (which took hours since Nero's servers run only slightly faster than a phone modem), I was able to get the audio in my Nero Digital File to play back in synch with the video using Showtime 2, but the video froze every so often and the iris transiton at the end of scene one is definitely not being reproduced at all. This is all on a Xeon dual 3.6 Ghz machine with 2.0 GB of RAM.

I am going to try one more time to use Mark's tutorial with the new Nero software and see if I can get decent results. I'll post the results here for those interested in using Nero Digital for HD projects prepared in Vegas.

Tom

I will be getting Part II up probably tonight or late tonight ;)

As with any new format there are always going to be glitches. If you want to create MPEG-4 from Vegas projects now you can do it with Recode. It you want to check out what MPEG-4 can do you can do it with Recode. I thought this to be a very interesting product and worthy of a good look. I still haven't had a crash, pretty impressive in itself.

Yes, processor usage can be high on playback, more on that in Part II. But, when processor usage is not floored on playback all of my test files have played back glitch free and they look fantastic.

I suggest reading both parts, experimenting a bit yourself and then coming to your own decision on the value of this workflow at this point in time. Hopefully I'll have saved you some time along the way!

- Mark

besides Mark's excellent tutorial and review -

This is a very complete, in-depth comparison of all commercial easily obtainable H264 and advanced mpeg4 codecs + DiVX thrown in for comparison

Tested codecs:

* Mpegable AVC Codec
* Moonlight H.264 Video Codec
* MainConcept H.264 Codec
* Fraunhofer IIS Codec
* Ateme MPEG-4 AVC / H.264 Codec (nero)
* Videosoft H.264 Codec
* DivX Pro 5.1.1 Codec (NOT 264! Used for comparison with H.264 codecs as well tuned codec from previous generation MPEG-4 ASP)

http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/mpeg-4_avc_h264_en.html

while ateme seems to be the codec of choice, in this study, the study also concluded that h.264 is a work in progress and, therefore, the study was meaningless for long term conclusions.....;o)

yea -- a kicker ...

though H264 is not something new , its 7 or 8 years old , but took forever to get 'approved'

Mark,

Without your excellent tutorial, I woudl never have gotten as far as I have with using Nero to encode HDV projects from within Vegas 5.0d. I am now getting a Nero Digital H.264/ACC project that will play back fine in WMP10 (in 16:9) (but plays back poorly in Showtime 2). However even in WMP10 the audio is out of synch with the video. Any thoughts on what might be causing that? During the encode in Recode 2 I checked the box to prepare stereo PCM. Should that not be checked?

Again I want to thank you for your tutorials. You obviously put a lot of effort into them, and they have been very valuable to me.

Tom

the audio sync issue is one of a few known bugs, along with some other audio issues and playback issues and profile issues - some things were fixed in the latest build ... but not all ..

using ffdshow - the audio should play back in sync

B_JM,

I did a Google search on FFDShow, downloaded and installed it, but I am totally at a loss as to figure out how to get FFDShow to play my Nero Digital File. When I click on Start>Programs>FFDSHow I don't see any player, just configuration dialogs for audio, video, etc. In short, how does one go about actually using FFDShow to play video files? I apologize if this is a stupid question, but after stumbling around on the internet trying to figure out how to use FFDShow, I am still at a loss.

Tom