Playback problems with Vegas video files

mastahkaz wrote on 7/10/2003, 3:20 PM
OK, i'm new to DV editing so I may not know all the proper terminology to use. Anyway.. I dont have any actual video footage due to my lack of a camcorder. But I have been making small video "trailors" from still pictures that I have. I was mainly just using Windows Movie Maker. Then I obtained Vegas Video 4.0 and tried making a new one in that. It worked awesome and looks great. The only problem is playback afters its been rendered.

The problem is that when something pans by really fast, like say the camrea pans across a photo, or really large text scrolls across the screen, It gets really choppy. Also if i zoom in on an image very quickly it will be choppy. I've tried pretty much every format there is to save in, low and high quality and its choppy no matter what.

I've tried playing it in WMP, Zoomplayer, WinDVD 5, etc. and it doesnt help, although it seems to play the least choppy in WinDVD.

Another thing i noticed is if i dont have any programs or anything running while its playing it will be a little smoother, while if i have ltos of stuff going on it will be very choppy. This makes no sense to me, I mean i can play normal DVD's, MPEG-1's, MPEG-2's, DivX, WMV, etc while having tons of things going on and playback is fine. But when i playback a MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 i created in Vegas it doesnt run as fluid as I would like. My system is a Athalon 2000+ with 512MB ram. So it can easily playback DVD quality video.

Now is there something I did wrong while creating this video? Or is it just a problem with the programs encoder? Is there anything I can do to fix it.

Another problem are de-interlacing artifacts. I cannot play an interlaced video that i created in Vegas in anything other than WinDVD without getting de-interlacing lines. And sometimes they even show up in WinDVD. Whats that all about?

Can anyone help me out? Thanks!

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/10/2003, 11:25 PM
You're video playback studder could be from to high a bitrate? Also, it might not be the playback. it could be you rendered to an interlaced file and those always look stuttery when playd on a pc. I played DV files (and mpeg, divx, wmv, etc.) fine on my old p3-667. Try renering the file as progressive scan. That should solve your de-interlacing problem too.
mikkie wrote on 7/11/2003, 11:03 AM
"...if i dont have any programs or anything running while its playing it will be a little smoother"

As THF posted, sounds like too high a bitrate. Doesn't matter how fast your system, video can be recorded/encoded so that so much has to be read off the hard drive(s), at such a rapid rate, that the player software runs out of data.

Regarding interlaced video, if you're only playing back on a PC, makes sense to render progressive. In my experience however, the quality of playback with interlaced video depends on the video card and drivers - with some cards you can't tell the difference between prog and interlaced as the card smooths this out, compensates. In your case I'd figure on the lower bitrate as a solution before deinterlacing, simply because while windvd does do some filtering, wouldn't expect it to be that much - I would expect it to handle the flow of data from the hard disc better however. Not saying don't encode progressive - just that I'd suspect the bitrate more then anything else.

Stuff that can help includes defragging the hard drive, running a raid0 setup, killing off anything else running at the time of video playback, playing back video from a non-system drive, using faster drives, making sure ultra DMA is turned on for the drives and so on...
mastahkaz wrote on 7/11/2003, 11:50 AM
Well you were right about the deinterlacing. I saved as a progressive mpeg-1 VCD and it runs smooth on my computer. I dont think it had anything to do with biterate because I was just trying to save it as the standard NTSC DVD MPEG-2. So it would be using those specs. Unless there a way to configure mpeg-2 rendering that i dont know about?

I also created an interlaced mpeg-2 and while it is choppy on my PC, it runs smooth on my television when i out it to the tv via s-video.

But that leads me to a new question/problem. Actually two...

A. Is there anyway to save it as a progressive MPEG-2? Even if i change the project properties to progressive the projected switches back to interlaced when i start rendering it.

B. While the interlaced video plays smooth on my television, there is a wierd "stair pattern" that runs diagonally on the screen when there is a lot of movment, or espically when a lot of white is shown such as a flash transition. What causes this and how is it fixed?

thanks!