Movie quality

flat7 wrote on 9/24/2001, 11:51 AM

I recently upgraded to 2.0a (91) from VF 1.0. My first attempts at rendering movies in wmv and rm formats have yielded far inferior results, although I've used the same settings (i.e. 100Mbps for wmv in both VF 1.0 and 2.0a). I've had no time to go back and tinker, but any thoughts are appreciated.
Thanks

Comments

flat7 wrote on 9/25/2001, 12:41 PM

After many more attempts I'm still unable to produce rm or wmv output that's worthy of use. I did however print to my Sony dv with beautiful results.

wvg wrote on 9/25/2001, 2:37 PM

Try the highest 3MBPS setting for RM. While painfully slow (expect about 9-10 hours rendering time for a 40 minute video with a high speed processor) the results are very good.

Now if you want to improve MPEG quality I suggest your try post production processing. Do all you're editing in VF save as AVI uncompressed. Then try TMPGEnc which is a encoder on steroids that allows you to fiddle with such things as bitrates and allows for variable bitrate processing, deinterlacing, softening block noise (those ugly pixelation artifacts) and so on. You can go a step further and first run through VirtualDub then frame feed to TMPGEnc to take advantage of all the filters that VD offers, many from third parties. There's even a filter that allows level adjustments, similar to Photoshop.

There's no need if you're just going to store on a hard drive or back to your camera or out to VHS, VF has pleny of templates for that, however if your goal is to burn CD's (my main thing) then you may find the extra work worth the effort especially for making SVCD or XVCD discs.

lungjian wrote on 9/25/2001, 5:20 PM

You may want to try uninstalling and reinstalling RM and WMV. Also make sure you have downloaded the latest version of DirectX (8.0a, I think) and the DirectX Digital Video add-on pack, which includes some handy codecs and whatnot. Just to make sure it's an issue with VF 2.0 and not the playback with your videocard, download and install the latest drivers for your card. Good Luck!

flat7 wrote on 9/25/2001, 5:47 PM

Thanks for the ideas, will give them a try. My primary goal is that of offering movies in a variety of formats and bitrates for web usages. I did download and install the required Direct X Runtime and DV updates for VF 2.0a. Of course for the internet my goal is to get the best quality possible in the smallest file size. Thanks again.