6.0d changes

[Leslie Wand]

hi mike!!!

and thanks edward.

don’t any of you ever sleep?

back to the number crunching (hopefully with a smile!)

leslie

[Edward Troxel]

Sleep??? What’s that?

Actually, it’s just now approaching 10:00 pm.

Edward Troxel

[Terje A. bergesen]

The current state of H.264 encoders is not a happy one. I would like to move a lot of my stuff to H.264, but none of the codecs are 100%. Apples Quicktime 7 is about 4% I’d say. A sad thing indeed that only rarely works. I have so far encoded to DV-AVI from Vegas and then re-encoded to H.264 using Nero Digital. This works well apart from the fact that Nero has a horrible (probably “user friendly”) user interface where it is almost impossible to chose the settings for your video the way you want them.

I was looking forward to the Main Concept encoder, and there are good things about it. On my AMD 64×2 it is fast for an H.264 encoder. I was less than impressed with the quality however. Comparing a DV clip encoded with Nero and the same with MC, the Nero clip is significantly better than the MC clip. Color quality and detail is much better, and the Nero clip is 1 meg smaller.

Oh well, there will be improvements going forward I expect. In the mean time it will be Vegas -> DV-AVI -> Nero -> H.264 for me.

I have An illustration here: https://terje.bivrost.com/mc_vs_nero.html

People may of course disagree with my opinion 🙂

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Dr. Dropout]

Terje-

Could you post all of the encode settings you are using for your Vegas/MCAVC and Nero renders? Frame size, frame rate, bitrate etc?

thanks

[Terje A. bergesen]

Of course I can.

For Main Concept I chose the following from Vegas:

• Video rendering quality: Best
• Video

• Frame Size: Custom 736×416
• Frame Rate: NTSC
• Field order: None
• Variable Bit Rate Max 2M, Average 1.5M, Two Pass

[Dr. Dropout]

Terje-

There must be a reason you chose to render to a frame size of 736×416. Could you explain what that is? A specific device perhaps? File had to fit in a pre-designed web page? Other?

Also, what is the Nero encode’s frame size and bitrate? Is it the same as what you told Vegas to render with MC/AVC? How about the profile, framerate, field order… are those also the identical, or very close?

[Terje A. bergesen]

Actually, the reason I chose that was that Vegas/Main Concept chose that for me. You may have seen that my footage is 16×9, and apparently Vegas/MC figures H.264 is for computer displays and wants to render with square pixels. So, no, I didn’t chose it, it was the default size chosen from my project.

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Terje A. Bergesen