Does anyone know if there is a better mpeg2 plugin to use with VegasPro8?

Others have used TMPGEnc as well as the basic version of CinemaCraft.
Is the quality any better? It's a matter of personal taste so you'd have to try it for yourself and see.

...how major studios compress their files to fit on a single DVD?
First of all, it's burned to a dual-layer disc so you have twice the capacity to satrt with.
This means a higher bitrate which means better picture quality.
Second, they use MUCH better hardware encoders ($$$).
Third, they tweak the encode on a scene-by-scene basis in order to maximize quality.
Fourth, their source material (35mm. film) is much higher quality that any of us can ever afford.

...what architecture do they use that enables their DVD's to run on everyones stand alone players.
Commercial DVDs are replicated, not burned. This one step alone makes all the difference in the world when it comes to player compatibility.
I stick exclusively to name brand media (Taiyo-Yuden or Verbatim) burned on a good burner such as Plextor or Pioneer as this seems to eliminate (or greatly reduce) the rejection rate.
On the -R vs. +R debate, it used to be an issue with older model DVD players but my experience has been that, as long as you use good name brand media, it really shouldn't make any differnece these days.

Mike

The two previous posts are spot on the money. The one additional thing that makes (most) commercial DVDs look good is that they start with 24p rather than 60i. Thus, they only have to compress 40% the number of discrete events. This makes a big difference. I have taken movies captured over the air and then burned those onto a DVD+RW. I then take the same material (which has been telecined to get to 60i, even though the original is 24p) and done an inverse telecine. I then encode that to a DVD+RW. The difference is absolutely HUGE. I first learned about this way back when before I got my first DVD burner and was instead using TMPGEnc to encode MPEG-2 to SVCD and XVCD CD discs. If I didn't do the IVTC, the result was almost unwatchable (because of encoding artifacts at the low bitrates used by this process). After IVTC, the exact same material looked pretty darned good, except at dissolve transitions, blinking lights, pans across picket fences, and several other things that really stress MPEG-2 encoding.

Cinemacraft Encoder Basic, Canopus Procoder and TMPEGenc all give better results than the Main Concept encoder in Vegas.

None of them are plugins. You have to frameserve to them or write an intermediate AVI file.

Cinemacraft is the fastest, inexpensive, and as good quality as software MPEG-2 encoding gets. Procoder is similar quality since version 2 but is expensive. TMPGenc is pretty good and probably the cheapest option but slower than Cinemacraft.

Thank guys for your valuable input on this issue, I think I get the "picture". One last question; what does this sentence mean?

"You have to frameserve to them or write an intermediate AVI file."

Once again, you guys and this forum rocks !

Stevereno

One last question; what does this sentence mean?

You have to download and install this tiny, free utility:

Debugmode Frameserver

You then "Render As" from Vegas and you will find a new option in the lis of rendering formats. You choose Frameserver. This creates an AVI file on your hard drive which you can then open using any application (including media player, etc.). What you do is open this in the encoder of your choice and then render.

The advantage of this approach is that each frame of video is fed out of Vegas in uncompressed form and sent to the external application. Thus, you get zero loss, just as if you had rendered then entire project using the uncompressed template, but you don't end up having to store hundreds of gigabytes of uncompressed video (which is easily what you'll end up with if you have HD video) because each frame is fed into the external application without ever going to the hard drive.

For most of us here the biggest single factor from my experience is the quality of the camera you shot the footage with. Next is how you shoot it. The noise from cheap consummer cameras makes mpeg-2 encoding very problematic even at the highest bitrates.
I've put 3 hours of footage onto a SL DVD with no visible problems apart from one dissolve I was forced to use. There were no cuts, no fast camera moves either and the footage was from a 1/2" SD camera. The encoding was done with the stock MC encoder in Vegas.
On the other hand, same camera, same everything, stage productions can be a bear to encode regardless of bitrate.

From what I've learned over the years when using a lossy encoding system the relative amount of loss goes up dramatically as the quality of the input goes down. This applies to both mpeg-2 and mp3.
One trick that can help with Vegas is to add markers to force I frames.

Bob.

I am fascinated by all the info on this forum regarding mpeg files, as I had no idea that your could re-edit without loss of quality.

Does this mean I can:
1. Import mpg files from previously created DVD
2, Render mpg as a frameserver .avi using Debugmode
3. Import this avi back into vegas to edit on timeline with new dv footage

Have I got the gist of it, or do I have it completely wrong?
Any feedback to either contain or heighten my excitement would be appreciated.
Thank you
Paige

You are fine up to that point. However, your next render step is going to be lossy unless you render to anything other than uncompressed.

Also, if you are rendering back to MPEG2 then steps 2 and 3 are unnecessary, redundant, introduce loss where it cold have been avoided, and a complete waste of time. You would be better off both from a quality standpoint and a time/efficiency standpoint to stop after step 1.

Thanks for your response.

So is it fair to say that you can't re-edit mpg files without a loss of picture quality?

In case I'm not explaining properly - I want to use mpg files from existing DVD made in DVDA, add them to Vegas 7 timeline, along with new dv files from camera, render to mpg2 to make new DVD.

I've actually already done this, but the difference in picture quality is obvious between the 'Old DVD' mpg footage and the new.

I was hoping there was a small chance there might be a way to improve the final result.

Thanks again
Paige

You can edit mpeg-2 without having to re-encode and hence loose quality depending on what you do editing wise. Lookup Womble, it can do what you're looking for.

I've edited mpeg-2 from DVD with Vegas, re-encoding all of it and the quality loss is very dependant on the quality of the original footage. The more quality lost in the first encode the faster it goes downhill at eash re-encode. Footage shot with 'broadcast' cameras on tripods in good light holds up very well. Footage from palmcorders handheld by drunks on dance floors falls apart quickly.

Bob.

Nick,
What makes the Cinemacraft Encoder Basic so much better than the Main Concept Encoder?

I'm actually using DVD Architect 4.5 to produce commercial (replicated) DVDs for a small studio.

I use TMPGEnc. Cinema Craft's quality is also fantastic. Someone asked what's wrong with the MainConcept encoder, and it's that simple: the quality isn't as good. It appears to be optimized for speed. There's more mosquito noise, more block noise, etc.

Also, TMPGenc allows you to make more complicated changes to the GOP structure and manually assign frame types to maximize picture quality.

One warning about CCE Basic: you can't use it to create 3:2/2:3 Pulldown flagged NTSC files - only 29.970fps ones. The more expensive versions of CinemaCraft (used by Disney and LucasFilm) don't have this restriction.

It seems to me I recollect that these codecs were flogged out about 3 years ago in Vegas/DVD-A and the results were minimal. I tried Cinemacraft Basic (still on my machine) and saw no difference except it just made the flow of work longer. The good Cinemacraft codec costs thousands of dollars.
JJK

We actually did shootouts over here and outputting from Vegas consistently gave the worst results, especially in terms of Mosquito Noise. TMPGenc and CinemaCraft were always at the top (sometimes CCE was better, sometimes TMPG was, it depended upon the clip).

That said, I avoid the use of DCT Pre-filters for absolute maximum detail and am mastering material originated from 35mm film, so the source files are very detailed. If your source isn't as detailed, you might not need a better encoder.

Procoder 3 seems to give me less noise from dark theater footage than the Vegas MC encoder using the same settings. I frameserve to Procoder from the Vegas timeline.

I use the AC3 encoder from Vegas for the audio which is better than Procoder 3's AC3 encoder. Then I put the two into DVDA and get good results. The only thing it won't do is save the Vegas markers automatically to create automatic chapters in DVDA. You have to do those manually in DVDA.

I author in DVDA and then burn a master with Record Now Max 4.5 (less problems than DVDA for burning). Then the master goes into my homemade duplicator.

CCE 2.65 gives me lousy results probably because I never got the hang of the settings (which are limited anyway).

John

CCE 2.65 gives me lousy results probably because I never got the hang of the settings (which are limited anyway).
The default settings quite aggressively prefilter the image and remove high frequencies - it can be turned off, but this is probably what you saw.

Sadly, almost all Hollywood DVDs are run through this process.

The issue with the MC encoder that is built-in to Vegas 8 Pro is that it is very old. Main Concept's not so free standalone MPEG-2 encoder (MainConcept Reference V1.1) is equivalent to the other brands mentioned previously in this thread. MC Reference also contains other codecs (H264, DVCPRO HD, JPEG2000, etc.) and the demo is both fully functional and not time limited. The demo version does however, produce an output with a MC logo on all frames. MC also makes a plug-in for Premiere CS3 (MC Pro HD V3.2), but unfortunately, not for Vegas.

Great thread, thanks guys.
The encoded quality using Vegas's MC codec has had me worried since I've bought an EX1. Playing back the DVDs via RGB component into a CRT based TV it just doesn't look as good as it does at SD res played back from the Vegas T/L before the encode. I'd figured it was just the difference in screens etc but I've never been able to get my DVDs to look as good as OTA material and I've tried doing this from the exact same source, DB masters.

If the CC encoder has a decent low pass filter that could explain the slowness. It'd also be a god send. Trying to wrangle line twitter and aliasing with Vegas is impossible to difficult and I'm not the ony one having grief with this since the arrival of the EX1.

Bob.

Hi all, thanks for the discussion and revisiting this thread.

I've downloaded Womble - so you're saying it's best to do mpeg editing with this software instead of Vegas (which is a pitty!).

The only problem I have is that I've already created a project in Vegas with lots of edits, fx, etc using combination of mpeg and dv footage.

John mentioned the issue with noise in dark theater footage - this is exactly my problem - 'black is black' with the 'new' dv footage, and 'not so black' with the 're-used' mpeg footage. So editing from one to the other doesn't look so good.

I'll also have a look Procoder 3 - I still need to get my head around 'frameserving' - but my limited knowledge tells me that the 'frameserving file' should be sent directly to DVDA so when preparing a new DVD the footage won't be recompressed...

Are there any plans from Sony to handle mpeg files better in the future? It seems a shame that the general consensus here is that Sony are using an outdated encoder.

Thanks again
Paige

>> Nick,
Simply that the quality wasn't as good when I did side-by-side tests. At 8Mbps CCE basic looked the same as the original DV footage on my TV. Same went for Procoder 2 when I tried it. However Vegas' MainConcept result was noisier and definitely inferior to the original DV footage.

Your black problem could be due to a difference in how mpeg-2 defines black. You might also have to be wary of how it defines white.

Vegas 8 can smart render mpeg-2.

However once you do ANYTHING to the mpeg-2 it must be re-encoded, there is no solution to this no matter what you use to do it. Even with smart rendering there is a potential problem. For example the HDV spec defines the GOP as 15 frames. Mostly it doesn't matter until you try to print it to tape and then it all falls over because VCRs insist that it is 15 frames. So if you cut one frame from the start of a mpeg-2 clip then there's only one way to get it back to tape and that is to re-encode it and then there's more losses.
There seems to be reports of some DVD players not being too happy with wrong length GOPs either.

In general mpeg-2 is best thought of as a delivery format, at least as how it's used on DVDs where the bitrate is fairly low and losses can be tolerated. Keep in mind it was also speced for delivering content shot on 35mm not palmcorders, after all it was defined by the Motion Picture Engineering Group and I doubt Joe Average and his $500 plamcorder was high on their list of things to worry about :)

Noise will always play havoc with mpeg-2 encoding, even in bright sun a lot of cheap cameras have noise in the blue sky, is the nature of how CCDs work. The solution is better cameras and/or noise reduction FXs / software. Even 35mm gets the once over to reduce grain.

Bob,

Thanks Bob
A lot of good info here.

The original DVD looks good, I believe a Sony V1 was used to video. The re-encoded mpeg, not so good - mainly the black.

I think the answer to my problem is to try noise reduction fx as you suggested, would you have a recommendation of which plugin I should look at?

Project is SD PAL Widescreen in Vegas 7.0

Thanks
Paige