Quality Issues MPEG-2

whitneyd wrote on 6/3/2003, 12:58 AM

I have been using Pinnacle Studio 8.21 to convert 20 year old VHS tapes to DVD. Recently tried VEGAS4 + DVD in an attempt to get better final quality but final DVD quality is actually worse unless rendering at 8mbps vs 5mbps using Studio. The follwing process was followed: Capture, edit, render back to .avi; DVD Arch: render to MPEg-2, write to DVD. (P4 1.7, 845 cs, 512 ram, A05 burner)
Is there a better way?

Comments

RBartlett wrote on 6/3/2003, 3:41 AM

What format/interface-type did you capture in (DV, MJPEG,...: CIF,SIF, QSIF, QCIF, D1,...)?
What AVI format did you render to from Vegas? (DV, MPEG-2)?

Pinnacle Studio might know the capture card better than Vegas capture, if it isn't DV.
The Studio 8.21 shouldn't be noticably better than Vegas, so I'd reckon on the culprit being something caused by either of the above being sub-standard.

whitneyd wrote on 6/3/2003, 7:59 AM

Capture with SCLive to DV using Canopus ADVC1394.
Render to avi DV.

RBartlett wrote on 6/3/2003, 10:50 AM

I can recommend encoding the MPEG-2 for DVD in Vegas, I'd expect CBR to be comparable between both products. This is kind-of what the programmers were expecting you to do, but they made the encoder work for both (perhaps for when/if DVDA is available stand-alone, or for returning to old projects in other formats that really don't need editing beyond the odd crop).

MainConcept MPEG-2 encoder is well regarded.

Some choose TMPGEnc (now via Satish's frameserver for speed/simplicity) but I'd assume for VBR and 2-pass work for the best quality (ahemm, subjectively).

whitneyd wrote on 6/5/2003, 12:31 AM

Any othe comments........................

farss wrote on 6/5/2003, 1:13 AM

IMHO Main Concept works as well as anything on high quality source however coming off VHS is a different matter. For that TMPGEnc is noticeably better, I use it mainly to go from VHS to VCD, I tried using MC and was getting a lot of artifacts, probably the noise wasn't helping either, yes I realise I'm talking MPEG1 not MPEG2.

I don't know how MC performs against the rest of the pack at lower bit rates, you seem to imply there was some connection there.

MDVid wrote on 6/5/2003, 8:38 AM

Why not render in Vegas to DVDa NTSC stream, and AC-3? Then import the rendered files into DVDa. You could also tweak the settings under 'custom' to squeeze out additional 'quality'. But I have to tell you, that a visual comparison b/w Vegas4 and Sorenson squeeze, Cinemecraft sp, Cleaner 6, and Canapus procoder---Only the procoder consistently produces a better quality encode, and only on 2 pass VBR Mastering quality settings.

JTH

johnmeyer wrote on 6/5/2003, 12:21 PM

I would second the recommendation to do the render in Vegas rather than DVD-A. I asked this question in one of these forums several months ago, and the SOFO rep responded and recommended this approach.

I too am about to embark on the VHS to DVD trek and have done dozens of experiments and read hundreds of posts. Gven the poor quality of VHS (relative to what DVD can deliver), most formulas for doing the conversion usually use a lower resolution or bitrate in order to fit more time on a DVD. I have found you can definitely go down to almost 4 Mbs and not tell the difference. However, the BIG difference in quality can be had by doing some sort of noise filtering before encoding. There are all sorts of noise artifacts even in relatively recent S-VHS footage, and if you have regular VHS, perhaps some shot in the EP mode, from 25 years ago, then you definitely need to think about cleaning them (using a digital filter).

Satish's plug in for Vegas lets you use VirtualDub noise filters from within Vegas. Search under my name in the SOFO forums for the word VirtualDub and you'll find recommendations I have made to others about how to clean VHS footage prior to encoding. Click here for one such recommendation:

VirtualDub Filter Recommendations

Also, if you go to the DOOM, the Afterdawn, or the VCDHelp forums on the Internet, you will find lots of discussion about this topic. While everyone has a different opinion of the best way to do things, almost all agree that some noise reduction is essential.

My guess is that the Pinnacle encoder has some sort of smoother or block reduction filter enabled by default and that is why you are getting better results there.