Need a 'smarter' mpeg-2 encoder

farss wrote on 12/12/2005, 5:06 AM
I need to fit over 2 hours of high quality stills onto a DVD.
I'm thinking that technically this should be a no brainer, after all they're stills, so long as I keep it simple, cuts only that is. All I need is to ensure that at every cut there's an I frame that can have as much bandwidth as it needs and the following B frames need, well no or very little bandwidth, all they've got to say is 'nothings changed at all'.
I do see two problems with this late night musing.
1) I could end up freaking out the decoder / DVD player as the min to max ratio of the stream will be very large.
2) How to get an encoder to play along with my scheme.

As I understand it Vegas and the MC encoder don't dance very closely, it's just left to flounder as best it can with no cues from Vegas about cuts. FCP and Compressor do dance a bit closer but even then you've got to set flags to tell the encoder to insert an I frame, that's mostly so chapters hit I frames and even so there's a lot of stills in this project, meaning a lot of markers.
So I'm hoping maybe someone knows of a real smart encoder that can work out where the cuts lie for itself, reading through something else about pulldown removal I see it's not that hard for modern code to compute that a video frame is a duplicate, so a mpeg-2 encoder might, maybe, be able to do this.
I guess I could just bite the bullet and author my first DL DVD, that'd give me more leeway, I know others have done it successfully and as this is around 8 separate programs I don't need to worry too much about the layer break issues.
From what I've read, best approach is to create two ISO images, one for each layer but what does one make as a preview copy for the client, I'm not hearing good stories about burnt D/L compatibility.
Bob.

Comments

ScottW wrote on 12/12/2005, 8:06 AM
How many stills? have you considered doing this as a slide show (picture compilation) rather than a movie? The only drawback to a slideshow is that you have a limit on the number of chapter marks (99 - one chapter mark per still) so unless you create multiple shows and string them together (which you can do with DVDA), you can't easily access things after chapter 99.

--Scott
p.s. the best approach for DL is not necessarily to create 2 seperate ISO images - the best approach is to use some authoring or burning software that knows how to correctly insert the layer break. Compatability issues are mainly because of the booktype, so be sure to get a burner that allows the booktype to be changed to DVD-ROM by the burning software (Nero will do this with the appropriate burner).
johnmeyer wrote on 12/12/2005, 9:55 AM
I wrote about this here:

Single frame picture compilation

Bottom line: If you want to put 1,000s of pics on a DVD, use a MUSIC COMPILATION, not a picture compilation (using DVD Architect).

DrLumen wrote on 12/12/2005, 12:09 PM
As to your I-Frame... have you tried setting the - frame setting to fall on a still transition boundary. This is assuming each still is exactly X seconds long. Say 5 seconds, then set the I Frame to every 150 frames (depending on 30fps).

Just a thought and I'm not sure if this will work...

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farss wrote on 12/12/2005, 1:03 PM
DrLumen,
Good idea if each slide was the same length but no they're not.

John,
what's the difference using a music compliation?
I'd thought that option in DVDA just meant it did the encoding without giving you any control over the parameters but I'll investigate that further.

Bob.
johnmeyer wrote on 12/12/2005, 2:07 PM
what's the difference using a music compilation?

Bob, read what I posted in that link. When encoded as a music compilation, the still gets encoded as a single I frame, no matter how long its duration. I put every single photo on a DVD, as an extra, that were submitted to me as part of a project for a local school. Several thousand photos. The DVD itself was a video tribute which was composed from these photos, plus video. I could only use a few hundred photos as part of the main video, but I wanted everyone to be able to view all the photos. So, included the JPEGs in a PIC folder that could be viewed on a computer. Then I realized that many of our students didn't necessarily have a DVD drive on their computer, but almost all them have a DVD set top player connected to their TV set. The DVD was finished, and I didn't have much additional space. I did some searching on this forum and then did some tests, and that's when I found out that you could encode in DVDA as a Music Compilation, and even several thousand pictures take very little space.

There are a few limitations, which you will find, but for what I wanted, it was perfect.
farss wrote on 12/12/2005, 3:55 PM
John,
thanks so much. I'm not 100% certain if this is going to give me the flexibility that I need as each slide is a different duration and there is a matching audio track but I'll certainly play around with it.
So far I'm just working on cerverting the CMX EDLs into Vegas projects, not exactly a 5 minute job either!
Once I've got the .Vegs put to bed I'll then have to see how I can get them into DVDA as a Music compilation, bearing in mind that there's more than 99 slides per program.
The good news from all this would seem to be that the DVD spec does allow for such an I frame only stream, creating and authoring it is the only challenge.
Bob.
lg777 wrote on 12/12/2005, 4:53 PM
Why not use a pure slideshow software such as Proshow Gold or Memories on TV. With Momories on TV you can use their native encoder which is MC or TMPGEnc. Both software produces great still results and very easy to use than Vegas since you are only using photos.

This is what I do anyways. I can't get good slideshow results from Vegas despite trying the recommendations in this forum.
johnmeyer wrote on 12/12/2005, 9:27 PM
The music compilation should let you vary the duration of each slide but, frankly, I never figured out how to do it. Even figuring out how to change the default from five seconds to something else took some work, and in the end had to be done via a "trick" (which I can't remember at the moment, or I'd tell you what it was). I usually write down these "discoveries," so if you need to know, I can probably find it.