Thank you for your reply. However, unless I'm confused somewhere, I see no 24p templates in project properties- I have Movie Studio Platinum HD 10.0. Nonetheless, I have been rendering to MPEG2 using the 24p widescreen template (it shows me the "=" sign beside that menu option- I assume this means it acknowledges my home-brew setting in project properties).

While I don't know the technical specifics, I have been told by many people that burning 24p to dvd is indeed possible, and this assumption seems to be confirmed by the fact that Vegas has an actual DVDA template for that purpose- a template which should allow me to avoid recompression, from what I have read.

This site

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/techspecs

claims that DVDA pro 5.2 offers 24p DVD encoding. This also seems to confirm it is possible.

If DVDA Studio 5.0 simply doesn't offer this capability, I guess I feel that should have been advertised up front, and certainly clarified at some point as I used Vegas, which all the while is giving me options to work in 24p that in fact the product cannot deliver on.

This has been many, many hours of troubleshooting. I would like to produce a final product using 24p, and I would like to do this without recompression in DVDA. Do you think this is possible given my current software arrangement?

Many thanks for your thoughts.

James

Musicvid might have mistyped. 24P is supported on a DVD, but when playing back to a tv it is converted to 29.97 interlaced.

What do you hope to gain by doing 24P stills?
If your footage was shot in 24P, I could understand wanting to stay in this mode, but with still images on a DVD, there is no advantage.

Dave T2

Dave,

Though I'm somewhat new to this, I've been told there are two primary reasons. First, images are progressive so you should keep them progressive. Second, 24fps renders faster than 30fps because there are 6 less frames to produce. I would at least like to do my own "test" to see whether there are any differences.

Though my source material is stills, I will be employing pan and zoom effects. I've received advice from multiple people who frequently make still montages that 24p is a good option to consider. I am by no means well versed in the technical details, but I realize there are different processes that happen to 24p depending on the device its played on, displayed on, etc. When burning to DVD, the sad fact is that the final product is in some ways beyond your control!

If I need to abandon my 24p attempt, I will. But I've yet to receive a definitive answer whether my version of DVDA is in fact incapable of burning 24p without recompression despite the presence of a rendering template in Vegas for just this purpose, or whether there is something screwy in my settings that I haven't detected. In other words, I feel as though I am currently asking Vegas to do a modest task well within its advertised capabilities.

Best,
James

James, AFAIK it simply is not within the DVD spec to assert a 23.976 progressive frame rate to a VIDEO_TS fileset. What is necessary is to apply 2-3 pulldown to achieve a 29.97fps framerate that is acceptable to DVD players.

This "2-3 pulldown" means applying flags into the video stream to tell the decoding device to "play that progressive frame again" in a cadence that yields 29.97. It doesn't muck with your nice progressive frames in any way.

Are you absolutely certain that DVDAS is "recompressing" your video? And not simply that it is instead applying the pulldown flags so it plays-back at 29.97? Applying pulldown flags would be much faster than re-render/compressing the video. Maybe when DVDAS says "recompression is necessary" that's not truly what is happening in this case (sorry, I don't have DVDAS 10 or I would try it to see).

BlackMax,

Thanks for the kind offer to try a test run.

Vegas' DVD Architect 24p NTSC Widescreen Video Stream render template does indeed give options to use the pulldown or not as part of the frame rate settings.

Whether I render with pulldown or not, DVDA tells me it must recompress because "24p encoding is not supported in this product" in the optimize disc window. That same window allows me to say "yes" to progressive, but when I look in the "project properties" tab below, it says it is not progressive (from source content, to project properties, to render properties, I've done everything I can to keep settings consistent).

I guess I can't be certain that DVDA is recompressing, but this is the evidence I am working with. I read one forum post suggesting this recompression might ONLY apply to the dvd menus, which must be in 29.97 standard NTSC dvd, but can't find that corroborated anywhere else.

However, I have read that I should avoid recompression in DVDA at all costs, and I am trying to maximize image quality.

I guess I also can't be certain whether the issue is in Vegas or DVDA at the moment...but it seems odd that Vegas would support 24p, but not in DVDA, especially when Vegas does indeed have a render template for that purpose.

James

>I guess I can't be certain that DVDA is recompressing...

Then if you haven't simply "let it fly" to see the result, then clearly that is what you need to do next.

In the end, I could tell you how to avoid DVDA altogether, taking your 24p file and using DGPulldown to convert to 29.97, and MuxMan to author the DVD (both freeware) but this would be cheating wouldn't it! ;-)

BTW you've been saying "24p" all along, except in the first post you said it was 23.976p. These are different!

I've burned numerous test dvds at this point, but I'm not sure my "eye" is good enough to judge the results. In other words, I am still learning to be realistic about what the DVD can and can't do from an image quality perspective. I'm still not sure whether my frustrations with image quality are due to a genuine burning issue (the recompression warning in DVDA being evidence of this), or whether I am already getting as much out of the DVD format as I can expect, and recompression is therefore not actually occuring despite DVDA's warning, or it is occurring but is not a factor, despite the many warnings I've read that recompression = bad.

At this point, I suppose it really can't hurt to cheat a little- nothing to lose by burning through an alternate flow. Any tricks I need to know with DGPulldown and Muxman? I've not used either before.

Also, I've read numerous place that 24p and 23.976 fps are essentially the same thing when using NTSC frame rates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24p

That's the assumption I was working with.

Thanks again for the help.

Also, when I look in the "properties" window of the mpeg2 files I've been producing, it describes the file as 29 files per second. Does this mean Vegas is already doing the pulldown conversion in the render?

IF your final outcome is to show a DVD on TV, and you are doing zooms and pans on still images, you definitely want a higher framerate than 24 fps. 29.97 (30fps) will give you smoother moves because there are more intermittent frames.

If you do 23.9 or 24fps, the DVD has to add pulldown, which is basically repeating fields to create 30fps. As far as progressive, here again a DVD on a TV is interlaced. Your progressive slides will be changed to interlaced during viewing, so you are not gaining anything here either.

I have never made a 23.97 or 24fps DVD so I don't know if DVDA supports this or not. I do know that Vegas Pro offers templates that put the pulldown flag on the rendered file, but here again, I have not had any use for this framerate.

Dave T2

Thanks, Dave. I have heard that the aesthetic advantages of 24p survive burning to DVD and display from dvd player to television despite the conversions that take place. If I am wrong in this assumption, I guess I can abandon the whole 24p attempt, but would at least like to know what is going on. If this is indeed not supported by DVDA, I sure wish Sony would have just told me that...

James

If you are referring to what people call the "film look", then yes it will survive because the film look that people have always seen on TV is 24 fps with 3:2 pulldown resulting in a 29.97 video frame rate. If you step through this type of film, you will see that every 3 frames you have overlapping fields that cause that frame to looked blurred/weird.

Some people like the "film look" but I don't. It has a minor flicker and as I just noted, the blurred frames from overlapping fields. IF you are going for this look, that is your decision, but technically there is no advantage with a still image program.

Dave T2

>I've burned numerous test dvds at this point

What I was getting at was: when DVDAS insists it's gonna "recompress", well that is going to take a looonng time vs. if all it's doing is adding pulldown flags. Dunno how long your program is but it should only take a few minutes to add flags, while if it's truly re-encoding then it would take hours (well, at least several orders-of-magnitude longer than adding flags).

Assuming your program is in separate video and audio files, making a DVD oughta be duck soup: Open your elementary video stream with DGPulldown and select '23.976 --> 29.970'. Open Muxman (mine's v15R) and load your video and audio, tell it your audio is English, and Start. Shouldn't take a half hour including finding-and-installing-and-muxing. Good luck.

Thanks for the recommendation. I really have no strong preference for the film look, but just wanted to test it out in different situations (including photo montage). DVDA, at the moment, is not even letting me get that far! I await a response from Sony customer service, and am hoping they will have some helpful input.

James

BlackMax,

Hmm, my burns haven't taken all that long (perhaps 5-8 minutes), but then again my file is only a few minutes of still images, about 300 MB as an mpeg2. Perhaps DVDA is indeed only adding the pulldown flags.

Thanks for the advice- I will give it a go.

I'm not sure this issue is answered for me. I have Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 Suite (which includes DVD Architect 5.0).

I'm running VMS very simply. New Project - BlueRay Disc - 1920x1080 24p (these are the choice VMS gives me via pulldowns). Throw some .jpgs and .mp3s in there and then run the Make Movie Wizard, which at the end sends me to DVDA. Newbie stuff.

DVDA (Optimizer or Make Blu Ray disc) then says it WILL recompress because "24p encoding is not supported in this product". I don't want to render again (why should I - VMS already
did?)

If I go back and pick 1920x1080 60i as a template in VMS (not use the wizards), DVDA won't recompress.

Why is VMS picking a Custom Template that DVDA says it doesn't support in making a Blu Ray disc with defaults chosen from VMS's own pull down menus? And why does DVDA not support 24p even?

Sure, I can make other choices, but why do I have to study telecine and other things to figure this out? If I just answer wizard questions,
DVDA should be happy, no?

- Sean

"As you can see, I want the final product in 24p."

Why?

>I'm not sure this issue is answered for me.

You have hijacked a thread that has nothing whatsoever to do with your post.

Well, certainly not on purpose. I generally try to find something similar to my issue before starting a new thread. The original poster seemed to be putting together a slideshow and wanted 24p without recompression. I'm trying to do the same, but with Blu-Ray. There's a lot of posts here, tried my best to be reasonable before opening a new post. Hijacked seems a bit harsh, but apologies anyway.

I'm getting a weird problem. I've prepared a 24p blueray stream with the appropriate template in Vegas 10. DVDA informs me that no recompress is needed for either the video or audio stream..... but when I go to 'prepare' the disk, it says it'll take over 4 hours to create the ISO..... it's only a 7 minute video!!!! It took only 16 minutes to render in Vegas. What the hell is DVDA doing that takes so long!