how is everyone doing it?

TeeJay wrote on 3/21/2006, 1:51 AM

I recently bought Mirage Studio, which is great for realtime paint/rotoscoping, an assortment of powerful paint fx and particles.
For me, it has really brought about boundless possibilities in my productions.

So here's my question. How does everyone else bounce between programs.
Eg. say I've captured my DV into Vegas, and start editing. There may be an event that I want to do something to in Mirage, so what is the most efficient way of exporting/importing? Do I just export that event as an AVI? Does this lose quality as I'm transferring clips back and forth? In the past, I've always rendered out of Vegas as an MPEG2 and then created my DVD in Architect. Should I keep everything as AVI and then render in Architect?
I'm interested to hear how others are handling their workflow.

T

Comments

farss wrote on 3/21/2006, 2:43 AM

Definately stay as avi, assuming you're applying no FX the process is lossless. Start encoding to mpeg-2 and you loose, bring mpeg-2 back into Vegas and you loose again.

Bob.

TeeJay wrote on 3/21/2006, 6:04 AM

Thanks for the reply Bob. So, i'm presuming I should do this and select 'uncompressed', rather than use a codec...............and, does this apply to my output from Vegas? Should I let DVDA do it? If it is already an MPEG2 file from Vegas, DVDA doesn't re-render it, does it?

I guess my original question stems from me striving for better quality.

I shoot on my PD170, and my images look great played back directly from the camera onto a TV, (I have a 42" Plasma, 134cm Rear Projection and a 59cm CRT TV that I reference between), but as soon as I render clips out, my image quality seems to drop dramatically.

Is this just the nature of 'home editing'. I have read a lot (bought Spot's Vegas 5 book), tried all sorts of options from progressive, interlaced, different bit rates, and seem to be doing everything right, but my DVD's just don't look professional to me. It's getting me down.......

I render out at 8Mbps, double pass to MPEG2, and have followed all of the recommendations in the template settings.

Does anyone have any words of wisdom or magic ingredients that I may be missing here?

PeterWright wrote on 3/21/2006, 4:54 PM

To check at which stage you're losing quality - print back to DV tape and have a look at this on your Plasma - it should look pretty much exactly like your camera tape.

If you feed DVDA a compatible MPEG2 file, using one of the DVDA presets for instance, then it will only recompress if the file is too large to fit on disc. Even though the DVD video is considerably compressed, the quality should be very much on a par with the original.

TeeJay wrote on 3/22/2006, 3:12 AM

Thanks Peter,

Well, it turns out that I have been double rendering all this time. First, rendering out of Vegas with an MPEG2, then re-rendering in DVDA. I can't believe all the work that I've turned out, doing it this way, and how much better it mat have been , had I realised.
This is one of the problems, maybe not all, but I'm glad that it has been identified.

Now, I know that if I am outputting for viewing on a Computer, I should render as Progressive. Does this extend to Plasma's, LCD and Rear Projection TV's?
And, if this is the case, does the fact that my PD170 footage is interlaced, have any bearing on this. Should I be switching the camera mode to Progressive. What is the relation there, any recommendations?