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Frustrated with AVCHD to standard DVD!!
Hello. I’m new to this forum and I hope someone can help me. I will confess to being completely ignorant when it comes to this stuff, only been working with it for about a month and am not happy at all with my results.
I have 2 HD camcorders Sony CX12 and Canon HF S100 (just bought hoping it would fix a problem). I have serveral trial versions of editing software (Vegas, PowerProducer, Premier Elements 7, Pinnacle 14, etc) and Vegas seems to offer the user the most control over the output. So, I’ve spent most of my time with that. I shot video of my daughter shooting hoops yesterday with both cameras at their highest settings… (canon, 1920×1080 24Mbps, 60i & 30p & 24p), (sony 1920×1080 60i). Each clip was about 2 minutes yielding 4 clips (3 from canon and 1 from sony). I copied files to my video folder and then fired up Sony DVD Architect 5 (trial copy) and created a standard DVD at 720×480, bit rate of 9.8 (I think… highest it would go without error). My wife and I watched the DVD and wouldn’t you know it, the 1 year old Sony CX12 looked the best!! The Canon looked horrible with the jaggies and video noise and what is the point of 24p and 30p? The Sony is unacceptable still! What gives? When I look at the time line of both cameras, each frame looks great in itself. The rendering just messes all that up.
I purchased a hi def camcorder a year ago, knowing I wouldn’t afford burning blu-ray until the media goes down in price, but wanted to be ready for the future. However, the resulting standard DVD down conversions are awful. Please help. I don’t need to use Vegas, if there is something better please let me know. Oh… I also used the out of the box Canon software and that looked horrible as well and didn’t offer me any adjustments. Thanks in advance.
Travis
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7 Replies
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I have a Sony CX12 (awesome little camera) and I render my video from Vegas as DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream and audio as Dolby Digital AC3 and then drop those into DVD Architect and they look fantastic. It doesn’t compare with the original HD but it’s a better looking DVD than anything that comes from SD source.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Well, first thing, you probably don’t want to render directly from AVCHD to DVD in DVD Architect. You can (though I never have), but you have no control over the MPEG-2 rendering.
I would keep my project settings at HD (based on the video), render to MPEG-2 “DVD Architect Widescreen” for sample, which does encoding pretty close to the DVD max rate. You’ll also need to render audio separately.. use AC-3.
Don’t watch your DVD on your PC if you can help it.. after looking at full HD, of course it’s going to look bad-by-comparison… but most PC players don’t do a nice upscaling, they just magnify the jaggies. Keep in mind, your AVCHD is six times higher resolution than DVD MPEG-2, so don’t expect it to look the same.. but it should look reasonable on a TV, compared to other DVDs, assuming good quality video as a starting point.
You certainly want to sync the video to DVD frame-rate. If you’re shooting 1080/60i or 1080/30p you want to make a 480/60i DVD.. if you’re shooting at 1080/24p, you want to make a 480/24p DVD. Vegas will happily do frame-rate conversion (looks fairly decent if you do it with supersampling, but it will take much, much longer), but don’t do it unless you really intend on doing it.
-Dave
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> $1000 for a handycam is beyond my budget
Well the original poster already has a Sony CX12. I was just pointing out that I get great DVD’s using the same camera.
BTW, I only paid $749 for my CX12 at B&H Photo and Sony now has a CX100 model that is only $449. So prices are coming down.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
> I know this is OT, but the CX100 is $389 at Amazon.
WOW! Maybe I’ll pick one up for my son so he can stop borrowing mine. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Forget bling… the Flip “Ultra” HD doesn’t even have features. First of all, it shoots HD, but just barely… 1280×720 at 30fps. This is recording at 9Mb/s… real AVCHD models record at 17-24Mb/s, HDV and DV record at 25Mb/s.
Then there’s the lens.. f2.4 and no zoom… barely any lens. If you look at a “camcorder”.. hell, even a web-cam based camcorder, look for the lens. If the area that should be the lens is all full of glass, you have a fighting chance of holding a real camcorder in your hands. If you see rings of plastic leading to a tiny lens that would make a disposable 35mm camera blush and a pin-hole camera cry “brother”, you’re holding a toy for YouTube obsessed tweens.
You pay $170 for a “flip”.. for 2.5x that, you could get a Sanyo VPC-FH1, a tiny flash based camcorder, but one capable of shooting real HD. Very real… it even does 1080/60p. It’s got a real 10x zoom lens, f2.0 at the wide end.
If you can’t afford something at that level and want real HD, buy something used on eBay. I just sold a Hitachi BD70A there for about $250, with lots of extras. True, not the world’s best HD camcorder, but it’s day and night better than these evil Flip devices.
And yeah, the Flip, and all those Chinese clones of it, bother me. They’re trying to do to camcorders what the iPod did to the walkman… lower the bar, make “crappy” the acceptable new standard. Anyone smart enough to read/post at Creative COW is smart enough to stand up for better.
-Dave
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You can make an AVCHD.. though not with DVD Architect. DVDA will make a “Blu-Ray on DVD” file structure, which is ever-so-slightly different than AVCHD. This matters, because most Blu-Ray players will play an AVCHD disc, but they will not play BD-on-DVD.
And unless you have a really short video, you will seriously compromise video quality on an AVCHD. I guess if you’re new to HD, it’s nice to know you can do this without buying new hardware (and little software, if you have the Nero suite.. that’s how I found I already had the ability to burn AVCHD, when I discovered DVDA didn’t so it).
But I started into HD some four+ years ago. It’s a big shift, and that means, every element in your production toolchain has to change. So that’s an HDTV, and an HD camcorder (ok, I have three of those now, but the first one was a pretty expensive one). You need a player that can handle HD… when I started, the format war had not even hit the street, so I began with an IOData AVeL Linkplayer2, a red-laser DVD player that could play HDV over my network, DivX-HD, and WMV/HD. It recognized and player authored WMV/HD discs.. same idea as AVCHD, only using WMV9 and an arcane set of HTML and JavaScript conventions, with virtually no authoring system tools (HD-Net did a few WMV/HD releases without DRM.. my player obeyed all of Microsoft’s DRM conventions, but still was not allowed to play a DRMed WMV/HD… it was pretty clear MS never intended this to be successful).
So basically, I was tired of compromising my HDV video just to have a handy livingroom format (which would, at least, autoplay on pretty much any PC, without extra software.. most PCs can’t play AVCHD, because it uses the UDF 2.5 or whatever file system, same as Blu-Ray, not supported except on very recent Windows editions). Blu-Ray is pretty affordable these days.. BD-R 25GB discs, printable, run under $3.00 each in bulk. I started into DVD when they were twice that, and the burners cost $400.
A big advantage of DVDA 5.0 is that, unless you go crazy complex on your Blu-Ray design, you can simply switch the project to “DVD”, press a button, and get a DVD downconversion without much extra work.
-Dave
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HD is entering the mainstream, definitely. Not the toy HD in the “Flip”.. those are only for kiddies concerned with YouTube uploads.. the video quality is horrible, unless you’re targeting a 2Mb/s-or-less medium like YouTube.
The DSLR market is still growing by double-digits… that’s hard to equate with “tanking”. Most people who buy DSLRs are professionals or prosumers.. there has never been a market the size of the P&S camera market, or for that matter, consumer video. They’re around 11 million units a year, with Canon and Nikon owning about 80%.
Most DSLR users are not video people, or they’re like me, and have many cameras (two DSLRs, six film SLRs, various film rangefinders, three HD camcorders, one still pocket camera with 720p video… sorta-kinda, it’s only MJPEG).
I think Sony wants to dominate all areas of the video and photo market, as much as they can. After all, only that can explain why they bothered to buy the Minolta-Konica SLR works, given the tiny bit of pie left after Nikon and Canon have at it. Sony’s Webbie is a much better answer to the “Flip”.. the problem was, if you bought a Flip, you didn’t give a hoot about quality, or even a real lens. What you bought was software that held your hand from camera to YouTube. With most video gear, you have to learn something about the process. Not with the Flip.
And yeah, Canon was caught sleeping on that video-in-the-DSC thing. And on the “big zoom in the pocket” thing. Panasonic kind of drank their milkshake on that, which is why I have a Panny Pocket P&S camera, to augment my Canon and Nikon DSLRs, and Canon and Sony camcorders. Oh, and one Sanyo.
-Dave
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