Why im Going Back To Premier

Reanimator wrote on 12/13/2001, 10:37 PM

One word... Quality Out. I have rendered about a dozen projects now in SVCD & DVD format. The quality out is good but not good enough for me. TMG & CCE both produce a better quality picture. I view most of my footage on a Hi Def 57" Sony TV so im real picky. Artifacts become instantly apparent at that size. All my encoded footage using main concepts encoder Has shown some degree of motion artifacts on it. I have played with the settings as much as the encoder allows and still have yet to get a perfect encode. One of my secondary PC's is actually directly hooked to the TV allowing me to produce & view footage prior to burning the actual DVD ( No bad footage burned ). Dont get me wrong VV3 is a very inovative and easy to use program. I do like it. But Premier still has the major advantage of being able to frame serve to a high quality encoder. I fear VV3 is intentended for the masses and or the casual home user. With out frame serve ability you are limited to the output produced by the main concept encoder. If any of feel im wrong on the quality issue feel free to download a copy of TMG 2.0 ( Its free ) and judge for your selves. As for me... Im back to premier and frame serving.

Good Luck All
Reanimator

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Reanimator wrote on 12/17/2001, 12:53 AM

Ok GG Here we go...

Your trying to tell me that if I stand roughly 4.4 feet from a 13" analog monitor I'm going to be able to view artifacts better than if I blow the image up and view it? I disagree. My VHS material would look great on a 13" Analog monitor at that distance and I would more than likely be using the ligos encoder and swearing by it. How much detail could your eye discern at that size? Try this... Take 2 pieces of avi footage encode one with TMPG and the other with say the ligos encoder. Now view them at normal resolution ( 100% ) on your computer monitor. You will not see much of a difference. Now bump the resolution up to 200%. At this point the quality of the render becomes REAL APPARENT. Im doing the same thing on my big screen with only one difference. Im using a computer to put the image up at 720x480. Blaming the TV is kinda funny. As to how far I sit from my TV? I sit 8' from it and my image is VERY CLEAR. Even the scan doubled DSS signal is good. As far as me educating you... I already told you thats not my job. And for the record im more than willing to Listen to any suggestions you may have regaurding my setup. Perhaps you could let me know what the max resolution my XBR2 can handle, or what power strip timings & resolutions I should be using, TV tweaks, Radeon Tweaks etc. If you got a better way... I am all ears.

Anyways

Nite All

Reanimator

Tyler.Durden wrote on 12/17/2001, 8:46 AM

Here's what puzzles me:

"The footage shows the transition between two of my bryce images and then a few seconds of the second image. First image looks great, transition is fair, second image looks horrible. Both images are the same size and in Jpeg format."

THe report that the first image looks good but the second bad may be a clue. I might try repeating the test transitioning between two of the first images, or switching the position between the two (B to A). This may determine if it is always the second image in the sequence.

It's not much but might be a start...

HTH, MPH

SonyEPM wrote on 12/17/2001, 10:21 AM

ReAnimator: You mention frame serving from Premiere- can you explain in more detail what you mean by this-?
Are you talking about the avisynth plug-in?

FYI, Vegas does not recompress footage to DV or anything prior to sending frames to the MPEG encoder. The encoder is fed uncompressed frames at the size/rate/quality the encoder requests (set by the render settings).

Reanimator wrote on 12/17/2001, 7:54 PM

I think I may have found what is causing the issue and it may sound dumb. After sending a sample of my footage to Main Concept it occured to me there was something I had not checked. The Mp3 sound tracks that were On most stuff I was rendering. Sooo I took the Mp3 tracks out of 2 projects and guess what? No more pulsating transparent artifacts. Now... I am totally ignorant when it comes to audio stuff of the PC kind. I do know that the tracks I was using were stuff I pulled off the news groups around early 1998. dont know if mp3 encoding methods at that time were any different than they are now? It could be coincidence.
The main concept guys have the clip I sent them so I know they can see the pulsating nature of the artifacts ( As if they may be pulsating to the beat of the music ).

At this point my question would be what is the method or methods that I could use to reincode the files into a usable format I could try in VV3. Please dont tell me WAV because those files are huge.

Thanks
Reanimator

pwppch wrote on 12/17/2001, 8:08 PM

At this point my question would be what is the method or methods that I could use to reincode the files into a usable format I could try in VV3. Please dont tell me WAV because those files are huge.
>

MCTech wrote on 12/17/2001, 8:59 PM

Yes, it did look like it was pulsating to the beat. I thought it was a cool effect!

Seriously, I also agree that WAV is the way to go. As SonicPCH noted, the file sizes are small compared to the size of the video material anyway.

I'm going to experiment with your source still images tomorrow, but I have a hunch you are right about the MP3 material causing this.

MainConcept Tech Support

jboy wrote on 12/17/2001, 10:15 PM

You mean we've been following a 30 post thread for NOTHING !!??

Reanimator wrote on 12/17/2001, 10:50 PM

Thanks Mctech

Im going to try and use the same mp3 in vave format and see what happens ( Soon as I hit zdnet and find something that will convert it lol). Thanks for looking at that footage and verifying that something was a bit wacky. And thanks to everyone else who constructively pointed out places to look and things to try.

Reanimator

HPV wrote on 12/17/2001, 10:55 PM

Im going to try and use the same mp3 in vave format and see what happens ( Soon as I hit zdnet and find something that will convert it lol).
-----------------
Vegas can do it. Just load it onto the timeline and render to a wave file. File/Render As/Save as type.
If you have other things on the timeline, just mute those tracks.

Craig H.

decrink wrote on 12/18/2001, 12:33 AM

So, are you still going back to Premier as per thread title?

Reanimator wrote on 12/18/2001, 10:56 AM

Looks like I am sticking with vegas after all. After converting the mp3 to a vave the artifacts did indeed stop. I will more than likely convert to AVI first then use TMPG or CCE for the final master. I have yet to test the split mpeg stream option in the render options but plan on doing it. Wow... What A trip. Who would have thought that an mp3 could cause an output video issue.

Thanks for the tip on converting to wav within VV3 ( Starts uninstalling the shareware downloaded from zdnet ). Like I said... I am musically challenged. I am going to work on that though. Like reading through the sections on music in the manual that I skipped.

Anyways.....

Thanks Again All

Reanimator

smeredith wrote on 12/21/2001, 11:04 PM

I also see a pulsating effect on some of my project's opening title when I render at the default SVCD settings. It goes away if I switch to CBR.