Looks like I filmed it with a mobile

DavidR wrote on 6/21/2012, 7:55 PM

This will be a long post so apologies in advance, but please read all of it before replying if you are able to help.
I am using Pro 8 and DVD arch 5 and have made over 50 films without problem untill the wedding I filmed 3 weeks ago. It was a 2 camera edit with a panasonic GS400 and a DVX100
The problem is the quality of the final DVD. It looks like I had filmed the whole thing on a mobile phone; but with some strange differences.
The footage looked fine on the 21" trinitron CRT I use for Vegas while I was editing it and when I played back the finished dvd on the same monitor full screen it looked good as well. I also tested it on the 15" widescreen LCD monitor I use as a focus assist when filming and again all was good, though I did notice it was letterboxed which I was not expecting.
The problems started when I played the DVD in a standard DVD player on to a 26" flat panel TV. It was awful. Everything was blocky and smeared.
The faces were the worst bit, they looked like they were painted on with a 16 colour gamut by a 4 year old and anything moving was out of focus. The strange bit is that when everything is still it slowly comes back in to focus and if they keep still long enough it is pin sharp. Cutting the cake is a good example of the problem. The cake is pin sharp and the bride and groom are soft focus square block people who are going to lynch me.
I thought that there may have been a problem with the original footage so I put the tapes back in the cameras and played them back through the 15" widescreen LCD . And there was. It looked crap. It looked like the final DVD; all blocky and smeared unless they all stood perfectly still. I was ready to call them to offer a full refuld untill I realised that the final film, on DVD , on the same 15" screen looks perfect.
So what's going on?
I made the DVD by dumping avi files to architect and telling it to do the work and that worked a lot better than sending architect MPEG-2 files which is the correct way of working but looked a lot worse
I have tried deinterlace and motion blur but none of that has helped. The only other thing I noticed is that if I right click on the timeline and do properties media attributes DV i get 720 x 576 x 24 and not the 25 I was expecting to see. Is this relevant?
The DVX100 can do progressive 24 but was set to "normal" and the GS400 has no alternative than 25 fps anyway.
I will have to make a " Windows PC Optimised" DVD for them as they are collecting on Saturday but eventually I will have to fix or explain why that is all they are going to get.

Help please.

Comments

FilmingPhotoGuy wrote on 6/21/2012, 11:41 PM

I have never sent AVI files to DVD-A so can't comment on that but that may be your problem.

My workflow is to let Vegas "do the work" within the right template (DVD 720x576 "PAL") output to MPEG2. Then let DVD-A make the DVD

John_Cline wrote on 6/22/2012, 12:17 AM

What is the total running time of this DVD? Sounds like a low bitrate problem to me.

DavidR wrote on 6/22/2012, 3:27 AM

I don't think it can be, although it looks like it is. The total length is 1 hour 6 minutes but I have tested 4 minute sections of it and got the same results

PeterWright wrote on 6/22/2012, 3:52 AM

>"when everything is still it slowly comes back in to focus and if they keep still long enough it is pin sharp"

If the same shot was ok focus wise from camera, it could be a codec issue.

DavidR wrote on 6/22/2012, 5:31 AM

How could I check/fix if it is a codec issue?

rs170a wrote on 6/22/2012, 5:46 AM

You did capture the tapes through firewire correct?
My suspicion is bad cables as everything looks fine from your Vegas timeline.
Bring the DVD to a friend's place and check it on their system.
Better yet, bring it to big box store and try several players if you can.
BTW, for a 1 hr. 6 min. program, encode (i.e. render) from Vegas to MPEG-2 at a CBR (Constant Bit Rate) of 8,000,000 as this will get you the best quality.

Mike

PeterWright wrote on 6/22/2012, 6:06 AM

David R, not sure of your render settings, so I thought to check alternatives ...

Mike's suggestions sound a better start before getting digital, but if they make no difference, software ...

The big thing is to narrow down how it looked fine with Config A but not with Config B - eliminate down to which of the variables made the difference.

DavidR wrote on 6/22/2012, 6:22 AM

Hi Mike,
I have tried it on a friends playstation and sony 32" LCD and it looked worse than mine. I will try to reimport the footage to the PC with a different cable. I still have Vegas 3 on a Win 98 PC so i will try that one and see if I get a different result.
I have another job to film this weekend so i will use different cameras and tapes and try to eliminate some of the variables.

rs170a wrote on 6/22/2012, 6:54 AM

Try a different brand of DVD. Taiyo-Yuden and Verbatim are the most recommended.

Mike

PeterWright wrote on 6/22/2012, 7:03 AM

> I still have Vegas 3 on a Win 98 PC so i will try that one .... "

Aaaahhh ........... happy days!

farss wrote on 6/22/2012, 7:09 AM

I agree with John Cline.
If as said it looks fine when things don't move and is mush when they do something os wrong with the mpeg-2 encoding, it is that simple.
1 hour and 6 minutes should fit onto a single payer DVD with CBR mpeg-2 at just under 8Mbps with PCM audio and the results look pretty darn good. As that isn't happening start looking at the settings used for the encoding, some of the defaults that come with Vegas are utterly out of whack with things like Quality set tolow values and wacky bitrates.

Take a few minute of the video, encode it at 8Mbps CBR, take a screenshot of ALL the encoder settings, put it onto a DVD and if it looks bad get back to us with that screenshot.

Bob.

Red Prince wrote on 6/22/2012, 8:11 AM

What bit rate have you used? It could be it was too low, as John Cline has suggested. But since it looked good on your computer and bad with a standalone DVD player, the problem could also be too high a bit rate. DVD players can handle up to around 8000000 bps (8 Mbps). If you throw more at them, they start to break up. Computer DVD drives generally do not have that limitation, so your DVD can look great on a computer and terrible on a standalone DVD player.

This would be why moving objects are blocky but once they stop moving, they look fine. Because once they stop moving, the DVD player can catch up, so to speak, as there is not much change from one frame to the next.

So, please tell us what bit rate you used. Until you do, all we can do is guess.

DavidR wrote on 6/22/2012, 8:12 AM

Will do Bob

i will have to leave it for a few days but will come back with results asap

DavidR wrote on 6/22/2012, 8:32 AM

I did not encode it to MPEG 2, i kept it as avi and let DVD A do it for me.
After that I tried a 4 minute sample encoding with 2 pass MPEG at 8000 max and 192 and 4000 min and both of these were significantly worse than when I let DVD A do the encoding itself from the AVI
I am not at home at the moment so I don't have the info in front of me so 192 and 4000 may not be right, there were 3 options on the MIN setting and I took the lowest and then the middle one. Both gave terrible results

farss wrote on 6/22/2012, 9:12 AM

"I thought that there may have been a problem with the original footage so I put the tapes back in the cameras and played them back through the 15" widescreen LCD . And there was. It looked crap. It looked like the final DVD; all blocky and smeared unless they all stood perfectly still. I was ready to call them to offer a full refuld untill I realised that the final film, on DVD , on the same 15" screen looks perfect."

Sorry I missed this part at a first reading.

I've never seen that kind of problem from DV tapes, was it the same from both cameras, did you play them back in the cameras that recorded them?

"I have tried deinterlace and motion blur but none of that has helped. The only other thing I noticed is that if I right click on the timeline and do properties media attributes DV i get 720 x 576 x 24 and not the 25 I was expecting to see. Is this relevant?"

After rereading the above maybe!
From memory the DVX100 recorded 24p with pulldown as 60i, in theory the GS400 probably shouldn't play those tapes....maybe it had a valiant attempt at it and that caused the problems.

What I'm thinking here is maybe you've got the tapes mixed up on top of the DVX100 recording 24PsF60.

Bob.

rs170a wrote on 6/22/2012, 9:20 AM

Do it as an 8,000,000 CBR in BEST mode and see what it's like.

Mike

DavidR wrote on 6/22/2012, 9:23 AM

Hi Bob,
I played the tapes back in the same cameras they were recorded from and they were all bad. 5 tapes in 2 cameras all looking the same.
I only used the GS400 to fire the footage in to the PC. I did not have the DVX100 set to 24p and I am seeing 720 x 576 x 24 in attributes on all the footage from both cameras. Good thinking but I dont believe that can be it as i would get the correct settings on the tapes that were recorded with the GS400.
It may be I have 2 faulty cameras or 5 faulty tapes but that just seems too unlikely to be right.

rs170a wrote on 6/22/2012, 9:45 AM

It very well could be a bad batch of tape (it's happened to me) or the heads on the camcorders need cleaning.

Mike

farss wrote on 6/22/2012, 3:52 PM

'It very well could be a bad batch of tape (it's happened to me) or the heads on the camcorders need cleaning."

Nothing is impossible and it would certainly be worth trying cleaning the heads.
It would also be worth trying playing the tapes back in a good VCR.
You also need to monitor the video on a CRT monitor, in general LCD displays can do wierd things that make it hard to see exactly what is going on with the original video.

I'm quite mysterified by the issue though. I've seen plenty of faulty camera problems and very few faulty tape problems. None of the faults that I've seen matched the symptoms being decribed as DV doesn't use interframe compression. When things go bad with the DV the first thing that you usually notice it in is the audio. Then you get the little "sparkles" in the video. Both are caused by chunks of data missing when the tape is played back aka Dropouts. Serious head clogs cause horizontal strips of the image to be missing, this happens as the two heads write alternate groups of line to the tape and if one of them is clogged that data is not written to the tape. If the tape had something already recorded to it then the unwritten bands playback what was previously recorded in that part of the frame, quite a visual feast when that happens.

Still, the chances of two different DV camcorders having strange issues recording to tapes on the same day is very small. The chances of a faulty batch of tapes causing the problem described is also slim. I suspect there's more to this that requires deeper investigation.

Bob.

riredale wrote on 6/22/2012, 3:58 PM

Just as an aside, the suggestion was made to burn the 66-minute video at 8Mbps CBR + PCM audio.

Based on the formula I've always used, that won't work. It's 600 / minutes = total bit rate. For a single-layer DVD, this formula allows one to utilize almost the full capacity of the disk.

In this instance, 600 / 66 = 9.09Mbps (avg)

But PCM audio at 48kbps is 1.54Mbps, so the average video bitrate has to be equal to or less than 7.55Mbps, not the default 8. If we used AC-3 instead (192Kbps) then we could do the video encode at 8.9Mbps, certainly legal but too high for my tastes (pushes the DVD player close to the limits if there are any bit errors).

rs170a wrote on 6/22/2012, 5:00 PM

Thanks riredale. I missed the PCM audio comment so my bitrate calculator now says to encode at 7,344,000

Mike

gpsmikey wrote on 6/22/2012, 6:49 PM

If it looks bad on two cameras (that both seemed to have gone bad at the same time from the implied comments in the original post), the only thing both of them would probably have in common would be the tape. Wasn't there an issue some time ago about DV tapes and brands ? Seems to me there was a problem if you first used one brand then used a Sony or something like that - something about the lubrication clogging the heads. If I remember correctly, either brand was fine by itself, but you ran into trouble if you had been using one brand first then switched to the other brand. The fact that it suddenly looks bad when played back on the cameras that shot the footage points to something before it even got to Vegas

mikey

farss wrote on 6/22/2012, 7:35 PM

"Wasn't there an issue some time ago about DV tapes and brands ? Seems to me there was a problem if you first used one brand then used a Sony or something like that - something about the lubrication clogging the heads. "

Much ado about that problem on the interwebs. All turned out to be urban myths actually. For many years we sold Panasonic tapes for use in our cameras then switched to Sony, never had a spike in head clog problems. Many other things do cause clogs like damp tape. Really though the only thing we are always having major head clog problems with are Video8 tapes when people play them back in our Digital 8 VCR. The ME tapes just don't shed unlike the MP ones.

None of these kinds of problems though line up with the described symptoms.
A head clog means the read / write heads are spaced off the tape and cannot either get a strong enough magnetic field to the media or is unable to get a strong enough magnetic field from the tape to read the data back. Major head clogs cause catastrophic failure to read or write the tape, not wierd problems associated with motion.

Bob.

rmack350 wrote on 6/22/2012, 8:08 PM

The footage looked fine on the 21" trinitron CRT I use for Vegas while I was editing it and when I played back the finished dvd on the same monitor full screen it looked good as well. I also tested it on the 15" widescreen LCD monitor I use as a focus assist when filming and again all was good...

What I'm getting from this is that somewhere in there a good image exists but either it's not a proper PAL signal coming out of the camera(s) or there's some transformation happening later.

I vote against bad tape.

Rob