If I understand the posting correctly, I am experiencing the same type of thing. Slow or mainly static scenes appear just fine, but if there is any type of movement or motion, then horizontal lines or bars appear briefly on the screen. The video in the lines or bars appears to be lagging behind the other video until the movement or motion ceases, then it catches up and the video is fine again.

I captured the analog video with a bitrate of 2500 so I could get around an hour of video on the DVD. The edited video was than rendered using ULead to DVD - NTSC. After reading about the variable bitrate when rendering, I tried re-rendering to DVD again using a constant bitrate of 8000, but the DVD will not play in my Sony home player now. The variable bitrate had originally been set to 8000 maximum and 172 minimum.

Thanks...
Al

This sounds like a field order problem, which was discussed in this thread, and is common when capturing from an analog device. What’s happening is that your video is interlaced which means of the 480 lines of vertical resolution, 240 odd lines contain half the video (i.e., every other odd line) and the other 240 even lines contain the other half of the video (i.e., every other even line). The question is which comes first even or odd? Many analog capture devices capture the upper field first (odd) while all firewire DV devices use lower field first (even). If you play the fields back in the wrong order you will see a jumpy video with horizontal lines as you have mentioned. BTW, Ulead has a particular bug in their templates that render the wrong field order for SVCD. It’s easy to correct because they let you edit the templates but you have to know this and fix it yourself.

The solution for fixing field order in MS3 is to tell it what field order you captured in. Go into the media pool, right click on the captured video to bring up the properties and set the Field order to Upper field first. That should fix things so MS3 knows how to properly render the video.

~jr

JohnnyRoy, thanks for the Upper Field suggestion, it sounds like it will work, I'm rendering now. Ian, I'm using DVD NTSC template to render to the MPEG 2 format. Is this OK?

I must agree with b24482. Thanks to everyone for their help.

Here is what I have done that appears to work now.

1) Capture analog video through DC10+ capture card and Screenblast 3.0. Bitrate was around 2500.

2) When I right clicked on the file in the Media Pool, the field order was originally set to None (progressive scan). Based on JohnnyRoy's suggestion, I changed the field order to Upper field first.

3) Went to Make Movie and Save it to your hard drive.

4) Set Format to MainConcept MPEG-2 (*.mpg).

5) Set the Template to DVD NTSC. Advanced Renderer had the Custom button grayed out, so just went with DVD NTSC.

6) Description showed "Audio: 224 Kbps, 48,000 Hz, Layer 2. Video: 29.97 fps, 720 x 480. Use this setting to create an MPEG-2 file with NTSC DVD-compliant video stream, and an MPEG layer 2 audio stream."

7) Then rendered the file.

8) In ULead DVD MovieFactory 2 SE, I created a DVD output project.

9) Added menu, chapters, etc. There were no real options to set here, so I just burned to Maxell DVD +RW media.

10) I had three different attempts at the same 10 minute clip in this test. The one described above (which appears to have worked), one where I rendered to Windows AVI, NTSC DV format (Upper field first, interlace every frame, etc.) and one where I did not make any changes to the settings.

11) When I right click on the three different video files in ULead, I get the following properties:

a) No changes to settings when rendering (doesn't work)
- File Format: Microsoft AVI files - OpenDML
- Frame Rate: 29.970 Frames/Sec
- Data Rate: 2681.14 kbps
- Video: Compression: Studio DC10plus M-JPEG(16).
- Audio: Compression: PCM

b) Rendering to Windows AVI, NTSC DV Format (doesn't work)
- File Format: Microsoft AVI files - OpenDML
- Frame Rate: 29.970 Frames/Sec
- Data Rate: 3699.61 kbps
- Video: Compression: DV Video Encoder - type 2
- Audio: Compression: PCM

c) NTSC DVD as described above (WORKS!!)
- File Format: NTSC DVD
- Video Type: MPEG-2 Video, Field A
- Frame Rate: 29.97 Frames/Sec
- Data Rate: Variable bit rate (Max. 8000 kbps)
- Audio Type: MPEG Audio Layer 2 Files

Based on the tests tonight, steps 1 through 9 appears to have cleared up the horizontal line problem. Jjust hope I can duplicate this with a full video! ;-)

Are you guys professional videographers or just avid hobbyists? I was just wondering, as you seem to have an incredible amount of knowledge in this area, both technical (hardware) and techniques (software). I am also curious as to how long you have been doing this to have amassed such knowledge. Do you know of any good books, publications, etc. that would be worth reading?

Thanks again...
Al

>Ian, I'm using DVD NTSC template to render to the MPEG 2 format. Is this OK?

No problem! I was just trying to understand what was going on - I'm sure ~jr has hit the nail on the head.

Ian G.

JohnnyRoy, the upper field selection fixed my line break up problem, but now it seems to have spread to the whole frame. Let me try to explain: instead of lines breaking up, whole frames are holding back. If you'll pardon the expression, it's kind of like when I was a teenager experimenting with hallucinogenics, the trails. It would have been fine 20 years ago, but I really don't want to make a Grateful Dead home video:) I'm trying to follow Adinelt's suggestions, but we're dong some slightly different things, he and I. Well honestly, I'm not fully understanding what he is doing, he seems a little more knowledgeable than I am at this point.

OOPS!

Sorry if I got carried away with my descriptions. I have only been at this for just under two months and most of what I have learned came from this forum.

I am a computer programmer and like to document the different steps I take in testing and debugging, mostly because I think I have lost too many brain cells and can't remember what I did last week. Some habits are hard to break!

Thanks...
Al

> Are you guys professional videographers or just avid hobbyists?

I’m just a rabid hobbyist at video editing and have been doing non-linear editing on my computer since Fall 2000 (first with Pinnacle Studio DC10/8, then VideoFactory, and now Vegas) although I’ve owned a camcorder, title generator, effects generator, etc. since 1989 and have always dabbled in trying to edit with primitive video equipment with varying results. In addition to editing my home videos I do videos for my children’s school (a graduation video yearbook each year, and I video tape their plays and put them on DVD for them) and for our scout troop (I’m an assistant scoutmaster) all volunteer work just because I enjoy it.

I spent 10 year as a professional musician both performing on the road and doing session work before I settled down and got a "real job" in the computer industry. (private joke) My main instrument is the keyboard (organ, piano, synthesizers, samplers, etc.) so even when I was a musician I was into electronics. (I also play guitar and flute) In fact I got into computers while trying to hook my synthesizers up to my Apple ][+ just around the time MIDI was first introduced. I also write music and program computers. As a kid I spent a lot of time taking things apart just to see how they worked. I almost always got them back together again. ;-)

That’s probably way more than you wanted to know but I’m telling you all this because its not so much how long you’ve been doing something but what background you had to draw on before you started doing it and what kind of person you are in general (e.g., artistic or not, technically inquisitive, technically challenged, etc.) This will influence how long it takes you to pick up a new skill. If you’re really board you can read more about me on my web site. I’m starting to get into 3D modeling but that’s another story.

So it’s taken me 3 years to know what I know about video editing and 20 years to know what I know about computers. (gosh, that’s scary thought) and 35 years to know what I know about music (OK, I’m definitely scaring myself now because I swear I’m only 27) and 11 years to know what I know about kids, and I’m still not sure what I know about women. ;-)

> Do you know of any good books, publications, etc. that would be worth reading?

I found "The Little Digital Video Book" and "Nonlinear – a field guide to digital video and film editing" both by Michael Rubin to be very helpful in understanding all sorts of concepts and how we got where we are today in video. I subscribe to VideoMaker magazine and find that it strikes a nice balance between prosumer and hobbyist interests. Lots of good articles on how to make your home videos better.

> the upper field selection fixed my line break up problem, but now it seems to have spread to the whole frame

Bryan, What are you using to capture with? I can’t imagine what this might be.

~jr

Hi, that was an interesting Bio, thanks. It's reasurring to know that guys like you would take so much time out or your schedules to help folks like me. I really, really appreciate it. The people I bought the software from charge 3 bucks a minute, or they reply to my e-mails 3 or 4 times a week, usually with something that won't help anyway. So, thanks. Let me tell you what I did. I put some new clips of my little bluegrass band that we recorded last night in movie studio, two clips totaling 38 minutes. I did the Upper field on them, then rendered as NTSC/MPEG2 and it took 6 HOURS and 37 MINUTES to render aaaahhhhhh! However, it worked like a dream. I think I was previously working with a file that had already been rendered, I'd load that into my media pool, then render with all the suggestions you guys made, and I believe that was the source of my problem. Now I haven't burned the clips I put in today, but when I play them on Windows Media Player they look wonderful, no skipping, easy flow, good sound. I'm using a Sharp VL-NZ 50 Viewcam with Firewire. Is there any way to speed up my rendering? 38 minutes took me almost 7 hours. Shorter clips? Thanks again, Bryan Bridges

I’m glad it worked for you. Rendering is very CPU intensive. I have a P4 1.7Ghz with 512MB of memory and it takes me around 3x to encode a DVD compliant MPEG2 file. So a 30-minute DV video takes 1.5 hrs on my machine. 7 hours sounds like an awful long time. What processor does your PC have?

~jr

Only 886Mhz, but usually rendering only takes about 3x, if it even takes that long. I tried once again to render the same clips, and the darned thing never even started. It just kept counting up the hours (27) that it would take to render my 58 minute video. MUST be something wrong, here. All other programs other than Movie Studio were off except Explorer and Systray.

I have a 2.6Gh with 768mb ram. It seems to take mine about 3 hours per hour of video. I have found that if I kill everthing running on my computer other then rendering it helps speed things up. There is a free application called "Kill it All" that will shut down everything you don't need running. Can be downloaded from PC mag site or others. I have read that having disk defragged helps. That seems to help in cutting down of dropped frames.

My dad use to tell me to find a way to make money while I sleep. Not that this is making any money but I find setting that starting something to render just before I go to bed is a good plan. It also keeps me from being tempted to use the computer for other things using up resorces that could be used for rendering.

Can someone tell me the difference between using the upper and lower fields in MS3? I am assuming you are talking about the field titles "Video Overlay" and "Video"?