I'm with Mike on this. Plus, you have some major interlace happening? I'm wondering if the noise created by this is being "smoothed" by, the same thing, a too low a bit rate? If anything I've suggested makes sense, I'd be looking at the field issues firstly, and thence on and back to MPEG-ing. I transferred your samples into VEgas and apart from needing some CC-ing, I could and can see the deinterlace field issue. It is very prominant on her quickly moving fingers.

Noise, the bane of MPEG-ing.

Grazie

Thanks for the quick replies!

I think you guys might be a bit over my head... but I'll try to answer the best I can.

A few more details:

The program was an hour and 20 minutes.

The mpeg bit rate was set to variable 6mbps to 9 or something like that.
I started with DVD architect widescreen preset in Vegas, and then only changed it to two pass, and upped the minimum bit rate.

The Prores resolution was 640x480 anamorphic

The Prores bit rate 41GB file for 84minutes 84*60= 5040 seconds
41,000 MB * 8 = 328,000 bits
328,000bits / 5040 seconds = 65 Mbps
Hows that for an educated wild guess ;)

The screen capture was from the Vegas preview window set at best full quality.
I imported the mpeg file into the timeline

Could the softness be caused by the resolution conversion from 640x480 to 720x480?

thanks,
~Jay

Have you set your Project Properties to the same format as the media you are using?

Grazie

"The Prores resolution was 640x480 anamorphic"

Why?
Seems odd to me to go from DVCPro 720x480 to 640x480 16:9.

"Could the softness be caused by the resolution conversion from 640x480 to 720x480?"

Possibly given that it's interlaced video. Did you have a de-interlace method set in your project properties in Vegas?

As this was shot on 2/3" studio cameras me thinks noise should not be a consideration. It's hard to tell from a frame grab but both stills look remarkably noise free.

You will always get some loss of image quality encoding for DVD compared to what comes out of those 2/3" cameras. The chroma sampling is going from 4:2:2 to 4:2:0.

If I were you I'd make an effort to get the original DVCPro 50 files. I've never worked with them in Vegas however I believe the codec to handle them is free from Matrox and works in Vegas. The less resampling and encoding being done the better.

Bob.

640x480 has its origins in square pixel video (720 x 0.9091 = 654 pixels, which can get truncated to 640 to better serve the computer..:O). [And inevitably someone thought they should use that with anamorphic pixels too...]

You're shooting NTSC 720x486 video (SDI signal), then you're encoding that to NTSC 720x480 DVCPRO50 (which is OK, it just snips 4+2 lines). So far so good.

Then you transcode that to 640x480 ProRes422 HQ followed by another transcode to 720x480 NTSC MPEG-2...so you get mush...


Use either the DVCPRO50 codec from Matrox or just transcode to 720x480 ProRes HQ.

That way your video maintains NTSC's 0.9091 PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio) throughout, and your DVDs should look good (unless you have gamma issues too).

Also, when 720x486 gets cropped to 720x480 (for MPEG-2 etc.), if that is done symmetrically (3 lines from the top, 3 lines from the bottom), the field order gets reversed.

I suggest you fix that in Vegas and re-render to MPEG-2. It could fix most of your problems.

I'll have to double check the actual recording settings, don't know for sure what the resolution was.

Because it's the DVCpro50 in in a QT wrapper Vegas will not read it unless I buy the very expensive Raylight codec.

Just to make sure you know what I'm doing, I'll put it in a simple way that I understand:

-The cameras are set to widescreen

-For the image aspect ratio to be right on the 4:3 Sony monitor we need to push the anamorphic button. With that pushed, the live view and the recorded DVCpro50 file look identical. in both aspect and picture quality.

-the capture card is a Aja kona SD and we use VTR exchange to record into the DVCpro50 QT file.

In the studio the recorded material is pretty much indistinguishable form the live SDI. So I don't think the primary recording is the main problem.

It is possible that I introduced some problems when I converted form DVCpro50 to Prores, but still I don't think that would be the cause for such a drastic change that you see in the pictures.

Since the prores file was 480 lines, would the 486 native SDI be an issue in the example I gave?

thanks again for all the thoughtful detailed replies,
~Jay

> Because it's the DVCpro50 in in a QT wrapper Vegas will not read it
> unless I buy the very expensive Raylight codec.

A one-time $75 that will solve your problem is "too expensive"???

http://dvfilmstore.com/raylight-decoder.html

I haven't looked at it in a while, it is much cheaper now. I can't find a demo on their site. Do you know if they have one?

Besides, do you really think the Prores conversion is the main problem?

Maybe tonight I'll spend a few hours trying to figure out Compressor in FCS to see how it's MPEG looks.

~Jay