Scott, thanks. I think I'm going to go with a DV .avi render of the timeline and then run it through the LEAD MPEG2 decoder. However, if you have a moment, I would like to have your understanding as to WHY Sony doesn't just allow us to add an alternative encoder; rather we're forced to take the MainConcept plugin. Is there some reason why this is the case? Just curious, considering that there are other MPEG encoders out there. Anyway, I have another question for the forum in the event that you might also like to post your thoughts. Again, thanks.

There's no standardized interface for something like this. Sony isn't precluding you from using a different encoder, they just don't provide access for every possible encoder out there via Vegas - no reason they should considering that they've already chosen to bundle the Mainconcept encoder with the software.

I use Satish's frameserver all the time to frameserve to an external MPEG-2 encoder. Works like a charm. No difference in quality compared to having the encoder installed within Vegas (although that would obviously be a more desirable alternative. The only issue -- which you can quickly figure out with a few test encodes -- is how to handle the color conversions (RGB vs. YUV, and also the 16:235 vs. 0:255 issues). That will depend on your encoder.

Here's the link to the free frameserver download:

Debugmode Frameserver

Why doesn't Vegas use whatever encoder?

Guessing...
Most likely, Leadtech never designed/wrote the code to make it available in Vegas -- like Satish did with his excellent frameserver.

Why doesn't Vegas use whatever encoder?

It's a Windows issue, not necessarily a Vegas problem. Also, Vegas codecs are not available to other applications either.

From the DVDs I've burned so far, I'd say that the mpeg 2 encoder built into Vegas looks pretty good at the default bitrate. The only time I've thought about using anything else is when I'm trying to squeeze a lot of video on a DVD and reducing the bitrate to do this. How do other mpeg 2 encoders compare? Are they noticeably better at low bitrates?

I've done a lot of testing of MPEG2 encoders in the past at bitrates from 4600kbps to 8000kbps. These are my opinions:

For quality and speed I found CCE to be the best (even the Basic version) and that's what I use now (via AVI file or Frameserver). CCE is really fast and has served me well for years.

Since version 2 Procoder quality is identical in quality to CCE to my eyes but still much slower.

TMPGenc was not quite as good quality and slow.

Vegas' MainConcept encoder was softer, slower and not as sharp as CCE Basic.

Admittedly most of my experience is with 6000kbps to 8000kbps bitrates. For very low bitrates, I haven't done much testing.

Thanks John. I did in fact download the frameserver and installed it. But, I must be pretty dense because I can't figure out how to make the darn thing work for me. Yes, I read through the instructions and got it installed in the right directory and with just a simple click or two I was able to get it going...sort of. But (please forgive my ignorance), what's supposed to happen next? The program window comes up but nothing really appears to be functioning, at least not in Vegas 6.0. What am I supposed to be looking for? Would you be so kind as to perhaps list out for me here a Frameserver Step by Step for Dummies, otherwise I'm not going to get the benefit of at least evaluating the thing because I already tried and got no where. Thanks.

Laurence, I'll try to post something here after I do some testing. Thanks for your reply and comments.

You are correct in that the MainConcept encoder is not sharp. Even at bitrates of 6-8kbps, it still produces a rather fuzzy picture if you ask me. I did run the files through the LEAD MPG2 Standard filter and got noticably better picture quality. I'm not working in low bitrates at present, so I'm not one to comment on that scenario.
Thanks.

Would you be so kind as to perhaps list out for me here a Frameserver Step by Step for Dummies ...

This is typed quickly off the top of my head, so it may contain some typo errors -- I don't have time to perfect it:

1. Download and install the Frameserver from Debugmode.com (I think you have already done this).

2. Open Vegas and create your project.

3. Go to File -> Render As. Under "Save As Type" you should now find an option called "DebugMode Frameserver." Select that, specify a file name, and click on Save (make sure that "Render Loop Region" is either checked or unchecked, depending on whether you only want to send a portion of the project to your external encoder, or whether you want to send the whole thing).

4. You will immediately get a dialog that asks you to specify Format. You should select either RGB32 or YUV. I can't tell you which will work best with your encoder. You'll have to experiment (select a short portion of your project and use the Render Loop Region to do the experiment, and then bring the result back on the timeline and do an A/B while looking at an external monitor. You should see absolutely zero shift in color balance or dark/light levels if you are doing the right thing. If you choose wrong, the resulting problem will not be subtle and therefore will be easy to fix.

5. Click on Next. You will now get a dialog that just sits there and grins at you, but nothing happens. Perhaps this is where you got. What you have now done is created a "dummy" AVI file. You can use Windows explorer and you'll see it there. If you double-click on it, your Vegas timeline should begin to play in Windows Media Player (or whatever your default player might be). It may not play very fast, depending on what fX you have applied, but it should play as fast as Vegas can serve each frame.

6. You now open your external encoder and open that AVI file, just as you did in the last step when you tested it in Media Player. Treat it just as if it was a real AVI file, but be aware that the video has never been re-encoded. Instead each frame is passed directly to the encoder exactly as it would have been if you had rendered using the "uncompressed" option. Be aware that you may need to check or un-check the RGB 16:235 option in your encoder (you will need to find this option yourself, since it will depend on your encoder). If you set this incorrectly, the result will either be way too contrasty or will look washed out. Not subtle.

Why not simply render using uncompressed? Well, you can, but you'll need to use LOTS of hard disk space. No disk space is required when frameserving. In addition, it will take longer because the video must first be written to disk, and then later read from disk. At 60 GBytes/hour of video (for DV) this adds a lot of time (how long does it take to write and then read 60 Gbytes on your computer? Twenty minutes? An hour? That's a lot of time to add to a render. Finally, in more complicated scenarios, you can actually frameserve to another application (like AVISynth), do some things to the video and then pass the resulting frame to another application. I do this all the time, using Vegas to edit and color correct; AVISynth to do advanced noise reduction and other neat stuff; and finally my external encoder to encode to MPEG-2. It is all one seamless chain of events, with no intermediate encoding, and no reads or writes to disk (other than for the final MPEG-2 file at the end, which is usually 4.7 GBytes or less -- a amazingly small file compared to the hundreds of gigabytes of intermediate files that would have otherwise been required.

For me, frameseving is one of the most essential add-ons to Vegas. I would be lost without it.

Finally, there is a really old tutorial on this subject here:

Frameserving Tutorial

[Edit] Here's more information on RGB24, RGB32, YUV directly from Satish:

Frameserving RGB vs. YUV

all purely FWIW...

At one time in the docs or whatever I read that making Vegas' mpg2 encoder available outside of Vegas was a licensing issue -- at any rate the same was true of Prem Pro at the time. That said, the way Vegas works with RGB makes it harder or sometimes even impossible for Vegas to work with other software, i.e. avisynth import has been available in Prem for years.

Thanks Avbim & Nick -- reading your comments guess I'll recheck, evaluate the latest versions of CCE & Leadtech. For a long time I've gotten good use out of the Sony MC encoder, and on my usual source material, it was at least as good as anything else available for mpg2. But it's been a while since I went through the testing/benchmarking process. Gotta reinstall Vista (beta/trial/whatever) when new card gets here, so I guess it'd be a good time to re-check everything.

Regarding bit rate, last I checked the consensus in many of the forums seemed to be that anything much below 5 ave was really pushing it, & in my experience I have to humbly agree. 4.5 maybe in a pinch, but you're going to see degradation creep in at 5.5. The Vegas default is 6, which puts ~ 1.5 hours on DVD -- you can usually squeeze 2 hours if you have to, but the quality really starts to drop after 1 hr, 45 min. and you should start looking at DL IMHO.

I've mentioned a couple of times that if you barely exceed the max file size, Shrink if 95 or better quality used with the rendered layout works well, & will increase the sharpness at default settings - you have the option of more filtering if desired.

"How do other mpeg 2 encoders compare? Are they noticeably better at low bitrates?"

They can be... In a nutshell the encoder looks ahead to analyze the video -- there are a few methods for doing this, & each method has pros & cons -- usually the encoder tries to determine the method, or combination of methods that will work best for a given section of video. There's a lot of variability in how this is implemented, how it's optimized, always with the tradeoff of speed vs quality . Whether you're talking mpg2 or mpg4 or whatever, depending on your source and content, one encoder is likely to perform a bit better than another. Encoders with user selectable matrices attempt to work around this.

I would like to use frameserver to view the vegas timeline on a media center pc with DLP screen. I have been unable to get video on the remote computer. I hear the audio just fine but no picture. Tried on 2 different network computers with the same results. I can see the picture on the computer that is doing the frameserving, but not on others. Anyone have any idea what I am doing wrong?

JAB

Try uncompressed as John said if you have the HDD space.

John

Managed to get the network frameserving going. Terribly poor frame rate and audio out of sync. I am running gigabit network also, so I must have something configured incorrectlly. Local frameserve to other apps works great! I will diddle with it a bit more.

JAB

edit: After a bit more, I have come to the conclusion that this is very useful for rendering, but realtime previews are not what this was intended for. With that being said, it would really be cool if it would frameserve 5.1 audio. Frameserving to NERO digital works great and HD files 1920x1080 are encoded by nero in a PS3 playable HD-AVC file. Now if I can just get 5.1 audio in to the equation. I can get there by rendering a .wmv with 5.1, then using nero to recode to nero digital with 5.1 but would love to frameserve directly out of vegas to Nero.

One more point. I skimmed through this and didn't see any mention. I can't get the frameserver to work unless I choose 16 bit audio. It won't work on 24 bit. Unless the frameserver has been updated since the last time I checked.