Render stutters - (newbie help)

jkastrinos wrote on 6/24/2003, 5:13 PM
I am a newbie. I have been trying to render to something that does not pixelate all of my images and clips. I will be playing the file back full screen and pumping that out to a VHS recorder. I feel that my box is adequate: P4 2.4g, 512 ram, 7200rpm 80gig HD, nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600. I tried rendering to all of the different types and combinations of frame sizes. I have found that rendering to the Custom/Default Template (Uncompressed) and selecting NTSC DV (720x480) in the frame size gives me the best picture. Unfortunately, the video and audio stutters significantly when I play back the AVI file. Is there some other setting I am missing or is my box just not powerful enough to play back the file?

TIA

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 6/24/2003, 7:53 PM
Uncompressed is going to be difficult even for your computer. It will be trying to play back 30MB of data per second and that taxes even the fastest busses and hard drives. DV doesn't stutter because it only takes about 3.75MB per second. However, the problem you're probably seeing with DV is interlacing which makes it look jittery or lower resolution. If you output DV through firewire to some sort of DV -> analog converter then this will play perfectly on a television even though it looks poor on the computer screen. However, i'm guessing from your description that you're trying to use the TV out from the video card directly to a VCR, correct? This well end up recording the interlace artifacts on the tape.

My suggestion is to try a very high bitrate MPEG-2 format. Try rendering to progressive MPEG-2 with an average bitrate of 5,000,000 or so. This should give you the same quality as a DVD, be small enough for smooth playback, and not have the interlace problem of DV. It may be just a tiny bit fuzzier than uncompressed AVI, but VHS isn't known for reproducing sharp video anyway so you may not notice the difference in the final tape.
jkastrinos wrote on 6/24/2003, 8:45 PM
Chienworks,

Thanks for the reply. But how do I render to MPEG-2? I don't see it in any of the options. Should I render first to the high resolution uncompressed file and then give that AVI to some other renderer..er.err? My green-ness is showing.
Chienworks wrote on 6/24/2003, 10:31 PM
When you click File / Render As, you'll get the Rendering dialog box. Save as type: is a pull-down menu. Click on this and scroll down to MainConcept MPEG-2 (*.mpg). You can then click on the Custom button to set additional options.
PhilHemel wrote on 6/25/2003, 1:05 AM
Defragmenting my hard drive made a BIG difference on playback smoothness.