Rendering HDV footage to Mpg2 in 32 bit ...Hellish

soundvideo wrote on 1/30/2008, 8:43 PM
Since convincing my partner to move to HDV, this is only our second project so I am still new to hdv and the whole 32 bit floating point thing in Vegas 8. The 32 bit color processing sounds amazing in theory...(which is why I upgrade...good marketing sony..) but I just cant seem to render a 4 minute industrial for a clients dvd.

HDV footage was shoot at 1080/24p. Project settings are set correctly..I think.... and I kept the session as an 8 bit session. I noticed that the first attempt at a dvd architect render resulted in a dvd that had weird vertical artifacts that I just couldnt seem to get rid of. The track was a 3d track..Ive seen posts alluding to this being problematic.

So.......I previewed the sequence at best mode using the 32 bit setting AND....the artifacts all went away so I thought.voila !!!! Thats my answer..render using 32 bit floating point math, get rid of artifacts AND get a nicer image..

No such luck...renders crash midway through and Ive been using vegas for 4 years now and know it pretty well. After spending 2 days pulling hair trying many different combinations of settings and playing WAY too much guitar while waiting for excessive render times in vain..I am about to tell the client that hdv to dvd just looks crappy.
(My first experience with HDV was shooting a commercial in Central Park and outputting the commercial to Beta SP. No dvds here... Needless to say when I saw it aired on MSNBC over my little HD tv....I almost fell off my chair by the beauty of it. )

ANy help or thoughts with my dvd problem? Why do we still use dvds anyways..the ruin everything..they are becoming the audio cassette of the hd world.......

Comments

farss wrote on 1/30/2008, 9:13 PM
When scaling with Vegas make certain you specify a De-Interlace method in the project settings. That's perhaps why you had your problems in the first place. Never really had a need to goto 32bit going from HDV to SD DVD. I did once not out of need but just to push the colors. In reality I could have gotten the same result without all the CPU overhead.

Bob.

Edit: Forget most of that, I missed the bit about you shooting 24p!

Then again what did you shoot it on and was it real 24p or 24PsF?

Other thought, what compositing mode gamma 1 or 2.2?
soundvideo wrote on 1/30/2008, 9:39 PM
Good question....I believe my DP said it was "true 24p".
I tried both 1 and 2.2. From what I understand 1 is better if you are using lots of velocity curves efx and other bells and whistles. I made shure to get rid of all the problematic plugs like linear light. Why are these not working in 32 bit mode anyway..

Why not a fan of 32 bit. Theoreticall its makes sense to me and made my first hdv commercial shot in the out doors look amazing...tho it was laid back to beta sp...so no mpg2 rendering needed.
fldave wrote on 1/31/2008, 8:30 AM
Ditto on the project de-interlace setting. If the footage is very fast moving, use Interpolate, not blend.

Not sure about 32-bit, but make sure you use the Best render setting. MPEG2 use the DVD Architect video stream template, it has the video quality slider at 31 max. Also since it is 4 minutes, use 8MBPS constant bit rate.

Make sure your project is 24p and your output is 24p.

That is what I would try
soundvideo wrote on 1/31/2008, 3:22 PM
So doing everything correclt included loading 8b..Duh!!!
I tried the mpg dar template, set preview ram to zero, rendering threads to 2 and tried with the 32 set to 2.2

Mpg render crashed...
Tried avi for 2 hours of rendering time and that crashed. Now Im trying to split render in half...2 hours and almost done with first half. Just hope I can piece the two together and render an mpg2 using dar template.....Is my computer too slow or overheating??? Look at my specs..its also cooled with tons of fans and core temp is normal....Do I need a new workstation with 4 opterons to do this kind of redering...?? Geez thats like some crazy SGI ILM rendering setup.
soundvideo wrote on 1/31/2008, 9:54 PM
OK well its almost 1am and the 2nd half of the render finished in 4 hours. When I brought both pieces into a new session, they were all weird and jittery outlines around different edges of objects in the image. Never seen this kind of weirdness before. After almost 6 hours of rendering time , Im giving up and just using 8 bit. Man what a bummer. Wish sony could help. geeze this is really the only prob I have..sure wish I could fix it. Thanks for advice tho.
Good nite
Patryk Rebisz wrote on 1/31/2008, 9:56 PM
I assume u use a DVD NTSC template. If so u have to go to the video setting and change the framerate from 29.97 to 23.97 + 2-3 pulldown.
soundvideo wrote on 1/31/2008, 10:10 PM
Did that as well as everything other variable one could possibly think of but thanks anyway..