PAL template settings

srg.steam wrote on 12/6/2005, 2:48 AM
You may all like a laugh at my misfortune. I used v4 for some time and lately upgraded to v6c. I used to shoot in 4:3 and experienced no problems in rendering and encoding to PAL 4:3 MPEG2. I decided to set my two cameras to 16:9 for all shooting and crop back to 4:3 if necessary. I made a progam with about 230 camera positions and a lot of post processing only to find, drat, I had the jaggies when rendering/encoding to PAL widescreen. It was with a new camera (VX2000) and I wondered if the frame order was doing it. I simply could't get past this problem for wekks and weeks. Version 6c did not solve the problem either. Eventually I found out that the standard template for PAL widescreen is delivered with duff presets. The documentation was no help; just the usual lazy restatement of what you can learn by inspection. Eventually I discovered that by clicking the [?] button (top right) of the advanced video window, that the message deployed following the next click, on a pull-down or clickbox, chattily explained what the setting values should be. I went round the whole lot and found a few with fatal settings such a buffer = 0 instead of buffer = 234. After that the jaggies vanished.

You would think the helpful standard templates would be shipped with working defaults; wouldn't you? A lot of time and sweat was lost over this! Grrr.....
I wonder if any of the other numerous preset templates are useless.

Comments

farss wrote on 12/6/2005, 2:54 AM
Sorry I'm totally lost here, I do a lot of PAL DV 16:9 and never seen this problem, also I can't decode just what you did to fix it?

Be aware though, the preview for PAL 16:9 with Simulate Device Aspect set to ON is screwed up, the jaggies you see will not appear in the rendered output.

Bob.
srg.steam wrote on 12/6/2005, 3:15 AM
Oh, they were there after cutting a DVD and played on a TV. I live in the UK. Perhaps there is a difference in what is shipped to different locales.

I was trying to say that the only indication as to what the numerous click-boxes and pull-downs in the video template windows turned out to by using the tiny help button [?] looks like that, found at the top right corner of the window next to the [X] button for closing the window. Click that first then click a video setting value and a yellow window appears with an explanation. It is not a tool tip or an on-line help call to the main .chp file. It is a standard feature of help applications like RoboHelp. It was simply a surprise to me to find that was the only explanation hidden like that.

I have been a programmer and heavy computer user for 30 years and I think this way of hiding vital clues is simply incompetent.
MarkWWW wrote on 12/6/2005, 12:13 PM
Hmm, I think someone or something must have somehow changed your default settings - I have just checked on my (V.6.0c) system and the VBV setting for all the DVD and DVD Architect presets (both PAL and NTSC) is 224 just as it should be.

The only presets with a VBV setting of 0 are the HD ones, which one would not be using for DVD (and are all for NTSC anyway) and the so-called "Default" setting which, as has been emphasised here many times, no-one should ever use for anything, ever. (It's a daft combination of settings and shouldn't be on the list of presets at all, much less as the default preset where all it can accomplish is to frustrate and disappoint people with the poor results it produces.)

There isn't anything in either the main help file or the manual about the MPEG encoder settings, but as you've noticed there is some relevant information in the "What's this?" help. But if you want this information in collected form you can find it in the White Paper entitled "MPEG Encoding Overview: Using the MainConcept MPEG-2 PlugIn" which you can download from http://download.sonymediasoftware.com/whitepapers/mpeg_overview.pdf
It's little out of date now (doesn't cover the latest aditions, e.g. the HDV presets) but it summarises the details of these settings in a form that can be printed nicely.

Mark
jcarr wrote on 4/23/2006, 12:47 PM
Thanks for posting this.

I was getting very bad jaggies when cropping then rendering MPEG2 using PAL.

The MPEG advanced video settings did not cure it for me but I did find a cure by turning on super-sampling. A value of 2 seems enough.

John